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- Bart Busschots (host) – @bbusschots – Flickr
In this solo show Bart shares his expanded understanding of the many kinds of symmetry all around us, how it was triggered by a simple photographic challenge, and how it led to his new-found appreciation of art of designing car wheels!
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Reminder – you can submit questions for future Q & A shows at http://lets-talk.ie/photoq
I've mentioned it quite a few times now, but I continue to enjoy the heck out of the photographic community on Glass. Probably in no small part down to the fact that you have to pay to join, so only people who really want to share their work do, it has remained an island of sanity and positivity in these challenging times. My primary reason for continuing to invest so much of my creative energy in Glass is that sanctuary from invective, but secondarily, I also enjoy the fact that the site sets a monthly challenge to the community through a featured tag. Each month starts with a blog post by a member of the Glass team describing the month's featured tag, the tag then spends the month in gold at the front of the tag list as a gentle encouragement, and then a week or so after the month ends the Glass staff will post again with a list of their favourite images from the month's featured tag. I think these challenges are pitched perfectly in that they're not annoyingly in-your-face, but the little golden tag is always there, gently nudging you to think about the challenge.
The March 2025 featured tag is simply Symmetry, and it seems to have struck some kind of chord with me, because it's really got me looking at the world differently, and it's getting me to notice new things I'd not really been thinking about consciously before.
I’ve not share much of my work yet, but I’ve spent the past three weeks thinking about all the different types of symmetry there are in the world around us.
2-way Symmetry in Reflections and Parallel Lines
When I think back on my previous shots that were symmetric, the most obvious thing that jumped to my mind first were reflections, in my case, usually in still water. I figure I’d definitely keep an eye out for opportunities to see things reflected, but that didn’t strike me as particularly imaginative.
Watching what others tagged with featured tag I soon realised I’d missed something bloody obvious — sure, reflections mirror things top to bottom in our frames, but we humans love building things with parallel features, so standing in the middle of something parallel gives you lots of left-right symmetry. I started to see a lot of cool street scenes with parallel lines converging on some kind of interesting feature at or near a vanishing point.
Some of those street shots caught my eye much more than others, so I started to ask myself why, and that reminded me of something I dimly knew already, but had somewhat forgotten about.
Our Human Eyes Love Slightly Broken Symmetry
What the more eye-catching shots of parallel features had in common was a slight imperfection. Something human or natural breaking the perfection of the built landscape. A rarer variation on that idea was a blemish or crack or some kind of decay affecting each side differently.
Geometric Shapes
The next thing that caught my eye was shots that added an extra dimension to the parallel line to form grids of squares. These kinds of squares and grids also tend to be man-made, like the parallel, but it was nice to see some fun architectural shots in the mix of reflections and parallel lines.
One or two of the architectural shots make use of other geometric shapes for their symmetries like circles and triangles, but in the man-made world that seemed to be where the types of symmetry ended. (I was wrong about that, but that’s for later!)
The other geometric shapes were natural, and they were mostly hexagonal — nature doesn’t do parallel lines, perfect squares, ideal circles, but it does do hexagons! From bee hives to drying mud and even solidifying lava, hexagons are very stable shapes that really do occur naturally.
It was nature that finally opened my eyes to a whole other class of symmetry, and ultimately led me to a little project I’ve nearly completed and am nearly ready to share.
Radial Symmetries
Nature may not do perfect circles much, but it does have lots of circular things made up of radial segments. Flowers are the most obvious, and looking at my own back catalogue they are actually the biggest source of symmetry in my previous work! Sure, I have quite a few fun reflections, a good number of parallel lines, and even the odd grid of boxes, but I’ve shot loads and loads of flowers!
The one shot that caught my eye was a top-down view of an Iris flower which is unusual in having three equally spaced petals rather than four or more. That set of lightning bolt of realisation in my brain — I’d only been thinking of folding symmetries, but this iris had a whole other type of symmetry on offer!
Reflections and parallel lines are symmetric along one fold — horizontally for reflections in water, and perhaps vertically for reflections in glass. Parallel lines like streets have one fold too, again, vertically. Rectangles and grids have two, unless they’re square, and then they get two more from the diagonals. Triangles are interesting because they only have one fold, unless they’re equilateral when they get 3. Hexagons have six, three along the mid-lines of the parallel sides, and three along a lines from every point to its opposite number. That was starting to bend my brain already, and then of course you have perfect circles, which have an infinity of possible folds.
The Iris flower had three folds since the petals were equally spaced and equal in size, but it had something else going on too — it could rotate over itself three ways — it had rotational symmetry around it’s center. That’s what makes ‘circular’ flowers cool! There are lots and lots of different arrangements of petals. The total number varies, but many add an extra level of complexity by alternating the colours, lengths, thicknesses, or shapes of some of their petals. But, they all have rotational symmetry.
Had it been summer my project would have been to find 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and maybe more petalled flowers and collect them into a collage. But it’s not summer yet, so what could I shoot in March in Ireland with radial symmetry?
As I was pondering this I was just finishing a walk, and as I walked up my driveway and past my beloved new Polestar 2, it struck me — alloy wheels!
My Radial Symmetry Project — Wheels
Once I started to really pay attention to the allow wheels on the cars around me I started to notice that there's so much going on there!
I think one of the reasons they catch the eye is that the majority are based on five-pointed radial symmetry because most cars have five nuts holding the wheels on. Small cars like minis only have four, which means their wheels often look noticeably different because they have traditional folding symmetry as well as radial symmetry.
Because Irish license plates stay with the cars not the humans, and because they capture the year the car was first registered in their first two digits trends over time are easier to notice.
Older designs tend to be much simpler, and to traditional fold-based symmetry along each of five distinct 'spokes'. The oldest cars tend to have five simple spokes, maybe with some tapering along their lengths and some flaring where they meet the rim and the hub, but they're basically five-pointed stars. Some had spokes radiating from the nuts and the points half way between the nuts, so they had ten rather than five, but all ten would be the same.
Over time the ten-spoked designs started to differentiate every second spoke to add some interest, maybe there would be fix thick and five thin spokes, or every second one would be a slightly different shape. You still see that idea on the newest ICE cars, but now with the addition of colour of a sort with the use of black allow wheels with parts of the spokes ground back to the bare metal underneath to give an interesting effect. Often every second spoke is more black than the other, and the newer the car the more likely it is that the grinding will have some sort of cool pattern so there's more going on than just each spoke have one colour or the other.
Another trend I've noticed is that the designs that stick to just five big 'spokes' have started to add ever more flare to those five spokes by first etching a clear line down the middle, then splitting each spoke into a pair of parallel spokes, and then adding ever bigger shapes to one or both ends that they start to look ever less like single spokes and more like five-sided fancy flowers. Some really lean into the flower-like feel with very wide oval or even hexagonal shapes.
For a long time the designs retained their five-folded symmetry through each of the spokes, but more recent design have no fold symmetries left because they hook the spokes in some way, meaning all that remains is the rotational symmetry.
Finally, EVs have really shaken things up in recent years because of their strong focus on aero dynamics. While many even brand new ICE vehicles retain very open designs, EVs favour much more closed designs, getting ever closer to disks with a few holes in them than to five-pointed stars. With this move towards disks some really very unusual things are starting to happen. Some EVs are completely ignoring the nuts in the middle and reverting to four-sided designs, even more startlingly, some very avant-garde designs from the likes of Peugeot and Hyundai are using two-spoke designs, some with fold symmetry, and some without. These designs really catch the eye because they are so different to everything that has come before.
Final Thoughts
I've been very surprised by how much more there is to symmetry than I once thought, and I've really enjoyed looking out for all kinds of symmetries in the world around me. I hope I've inspired you to start looking at your world a little differently, and that maybe you too will enjoy noticing new kinds of symmetry in your neck of the woods!