High-Rise

with Leica Akademie UK

By Julia Revitt Photography

June 18^th, 2025

Colour & Form in the Urban Landscape with Kane Hulse at Leica Akademie UK

I had the recent pleasure of joining photographer, Kane Hulse on a Leica Akademie workshop based around the Barbican Centre and Golden Lane in London, UK.

I primarily shoot black and white, street or landscape with a bit or urban thrown in. So this workshop concentrating on colour, form and architecture was a completely different style for me.

I’ve never been to the Barbican Centre before and I was immediately struck by how similar it is to a JG Ballard novel - only to find out when I returned home that his novel High-Rise, was inspired by the Barbican towers!

So, pop your feet up and take a look through my shots and enjoy a healthy dose of Ballard quotes to put your mindset into a dystopian future…

Barbican Centre

At first Laing found something alienating about the concrete landscape of the project — an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other.

The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence.

Golden Lane Estate

For all the proximity of the City two miles away to the west along the river, the office buildings of central London belonged to a different world, in time as well as space.

Even the run‑down nature of the high‑rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways.