I’ve been shooting with the X100S for a few years now. Its low-light performance, exposed manual controls and comparatively light weight make the camera a pleasure to use.

The lens, although sharp and fast, is 28mm. I’ve never loved the focal length. Tracking down the increasingly scarce teleconverter lens, which ups this to 35mm (50 equivalent), was a game changer.

It negatively changes the weight and weight distribution, and the extra lens choice removes some of the simplicity of a fixed lens. However, it’s the perfect lens for my stylistic preference, and a place like the Barbican with its authoritarian geometry demands a lens that submits to its jungle of straight lines.

X100S, Tele

Brutalist architecture often takes small, functional units and repeats them to form larger, discrete sections.

It results in swaths of pattern and the tighter crop of the teleconverter leans into this.

The Barbican itself is so encompassing that it allows the deletion of the wider context without losing the actual sense of it. You can arrange and balance the remaining blocks and patterns within the frame in an almost abstract way.

As someone who leans towards seeing and framing things in two dimensions, this is a playground for those bad habits.

X100S, Tele

I actually have an intrinsic, primal dislike of brutalism.

It flaunts its sheer mass and distributes it with top-heavy hostility towards nature and gravity.

In cynical moments, I’ve felt that the crushingly low ceilings and disorientating dead ends, the pervasive sense of immovability and alien timelessness, are all an attempt at reinforcing the victory and dominance of the state over the individual.

Cynical moments.

X100S, Tele

X100S, Tele

The crush of sky between two opposing buildings, archipelagos of sunburnt grass floating in a sea of brick, geometric water fountains. Nature’s survival is designed.