Title: End Transmission, fine art photograph of Radio City building phasing in and out of existence, symbolizing letting go of toxic people and circumstances, and finding peace.
In 2012, I stood in Manhattan photographing the Radio City building inside Rockefeller Center, doing exactly what most visitors with a camera do in that city. Documenting the architecture. Nothing about the moment felt unusual. I wasn’t thinking about meaning, or metaphor, or anything beyond the simple pleasure of capturing a famous piece of New York in front of me.
The image that became End Transmission wouldn’t exist, not really, for years. What it eventually became is a piece about letting go of toxic people, and the quiet, unglamorous courage that actually takes.
The Moment Behind the Image
I photographed the building because it was striking, the way its lines cut upward against the sky, the sense of scale that only a handful of cities on earth actually deliver. At the time, that was the whole story. A tourist’s instinct to document something worth remembering, nothing more.
Title: Original capture in Manhattan, New York
It was only when I came back to the image later, long after that trip, that it started to become something else. I began working with the leading lines already built into the architecture itself, the strong verticals and converging edges the building offers almost too generously. I layered in blur and texture, working the image through multiple passes until the original documentary photograph had transformed into something considerably more abstract, and considerably more personal.
Somewhere in that process, I found myself thinking about what a radio tower actually does. It sends. It receives. It transmits information back and forth, indiscriminately, whatever frequency happens to be tuned in. And once I saw the building that way, I couldn’t unsee it. This wasn’t a piece about architecture anymore. It was a piece about the information we let into our lives, and what happens when we finally decide to stop receiving certain signals altogether.
The Technical Choices Behind the Emotion
The leading lines do most of the emotional work in this piece. Radio City’s architecture already pulls the eye upward and inward, toward a vanishing point, the kind of visual structure that photographers usually use to draw a viewer deeper into a scene. I leaned into that instinct rather than softening it, letting the converging lines feel almost urgent, like a signal actively being sent somewhere.
The blur and texture came next, layered over those lines to blur the boundary between architecture and transmission, between a solid building and something less physical, an idea passing through the air rather than a structure standing still. Working across multiple layers let me control exactly how much of the original documentary image remained visible underneath, and how much dissolved into abstraction. That balance mattered. Too much clarity and the piece stays a photograph of a building. Too much abstraction and it loses the architecture that gave the metaphor its shape in the first place.
In the final edit, the building itself phases in and out of existence, solid in some passages, dissolving into texture and light in others. That instability was deliberate. It’s meant to hold the same idea the piece is built around, that we are capable of making something disappear from our lives. A person, an old wound, a pattern we’ve outgrown. Nothing about that process happens instantly or completely. It phases. It fades in places and holds firm in others, the way actually letting go of something painful rarely happens in one clean break. The building’s flicker between presence and absence is the piece’s clearest statement of what it means to move on from a bad experience and finally live in peace.
What It Means Now
End Transmission is about the people you let broadcast into your life, and the ones you finally choose to stop receiving.
Everyone has encountered them. People who take without giving anything back. People who show up during your hardest moments not to support you, but because your hardship gives them something they need. People whose entire frequency is self-interest, narcissism, or a kind of selfishness so complete they’ve never once considered who you actually are underneath what you can offer them.
For a long time, I thought staying tuned in to those people was simply part of being a decent person. Loyalty. Patience. Giving someone one more chance to change their frequency. What this piece represents is the moment I stopped believing that was true, and understood that letting go of toxic people isn’t cruelty. It’s clarity. It’s recognising that your own frequency, the one that deserves people who give as much as they take, is worth protecting.
Tuning out that noise doesn’t just remove something negative. It makes room. It clears the frequency for the people who actually deserve to be on it, and reminds you that you were always worthy of that same consideration in return. The building phasing in and out across the final image is that process made visible, proof that the noise doesn’t have to be permanent, and that peace is something you can actually build toward, frame by frame.
The Print
End Transmission carries the architecture of a specific place and a specific year, but the meaning it eventually took on has very little to do with New York at all. It’s a piece about letting go of toxic people and the signals we choose to keep receiving, and the courage it takes to finally switch the channel on the ones that no longer serve us.
You can view End Transmission on andrewpara.com.
