Building Visions.

Even if you’ve seen them many times, the buildings in Bruce Gora’s photographs can be hard to place.

"I always call my work ‘architectural abstraction,’" says Gora, a principal of Gora/McGahey Associates in Architecture in Fort Myers. He points to a unique photograph at Sasse’s, a restaurant in Fort Myers, where more than a dozen of his photos hang. He used Photoshop to merge a shot of a Delray Beach hotel with one of a sunrise at Babcock Ranch, he explains. "With architectural abstraction, it’s a photo of a building, but it’s got a pattern in it, or it’s got a high contrast. I’m not trying to capture the building, just the geometry that I picked up on."

Gora learned the basics from his artistic mentor, acclaimed photographer Jerry Uelsmann, who taught at the University of Florida from 1968 to 1973, when Gora attended. Gora still has shots he took, representative of the times, of protesters and police.

As Gora built his career in architecture, however, he increasingly pictured the world in black and white—literally. A talented trumpeter, Gora photographed musicians he met when he played gigs or went to hear them. Now he shoots primarily architectural elements, which would be fairly mundane if they were photographed in color, he says.

"You know, I’d be very disappointed if I were taking color pictures and the sky was overcast. [For a black-and-white photographer], that’s just part of the texture. Interesting and different colors have nothing to do with it. I look at the world [through my lens] in a very different way," Gora says.