The challenge Ed Reeve faced capturing Snøhetta’s Ithra, with its facade of fine stainless steel tubes, foreshadowed the photographer's efforts to document his late father's identity
Ed Reeve tells me he wanted to be a photographer from an early age: ‘I used to close one eye and frame something through a door or window; when my parents asked what I was doing , I’d say making pictures.’ They must have made a mental note; when he turned 11 they bought him a green Konica Pop 35mm camera and he’s never looked back.
Starting with family and friends, cars and landscapes, his ambitions grew as he got older – a birthday present for schoolmates would be to shoot their parties and give them the album. When his father died in 2016, he captured his garage using the medium he loved to summon a sense of the man he’d lost: ‘It said so much about him; his pipe, how he hung up his tools, nuts and bolts in tobacco tins, or scribbled notes on boxes.’
While working in Saudi Arabia shortly before this life-changing event, he took this twilight shot of Snøhetta’s Ithra: a strange, primal form rising, he says, from the site where the state first struck oil. Like delicately balanced pebbles, it seems a metaphor for the serendipitous geologies hidden below the sands. Reeve says he struggled with its facade of fine, stainless steel tubes, which resulted in a strong moiré effect; like oil on water.
Soon after, he’d find himself in his late father’s garage, wrestling with his own efforts to give form to the ineffable; ‘in a way, to do a portrait of him, but without him in it’.