Constructing Worlds at the Barbican review – how photography fell in love with architecture
This article is more than 9 years oldFrom Manhattan’s thrusting skyscrapers to the elegant ruins of war-torn Afghanistan, a spectacular new show celebrates the drama of modern architecture
Constructing Worlds begins with Berenice Abbott’s iconic Night View, New York, 1932, a black and white image of illuminated skyscrapers taken from the top of the Empire State Building. Abbott’s evocation of an almost magical modernist metropolis echoes though the entire exhibition, which ranges from 1932 to 2011, but her way of seeing was influenced by Eugène Atget, whose studies of a much older city, Paris, so captivated her that she acquired most of his archive on his death in 1927.
“As a result,” writes David Campany in his catalogue essay, “an equivocal take on progress – looking askance or awry at the white heat of modernisation – became an important part of serious photography.” It has been that way ever since – even though, as this exhibition shows, form as an end in itself has captivated certain photographers, from Lucien Hervé to Hiroshi Sugimoto, as much as it has driven architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.
“Since the earliest days of photography,” write the curators, Alona Pardo and Elias Redstone, “architecture has been the medium’s most willing accomplice.” Leaving aside the fact that one could say much the same of landscape or portraiture, Constructing Worlds does a good, if highly selective, job of illustrating the often tricky relationship between buildings and their representation in photographs.
From Abbott’s images of a city caught between the surge of modernity and the messy, makeshift urban landscape that lurked beyond Manhattan’s tall towers, it moves on to Walker Evans, who was simultaneously documenting sharecropper’s shacks in the American south during the Great Depression. The restlessly creative Evans moved from social documentary to vernacular photography, becoming increasingly fascinated by the churches, shop fronts and signage of an everyday America that, until he pointed his camera at it, remained virtually unchronicled.
Untouched by the romantic grandeur of America that attracted photographers such as Ansel Adams, Evans was a touchstone for the likes of Robert Frank, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, all of whom looked illuminatingly at that everyday America in their different ways. It is Shore whose work is included here, with his detached colour studies of American streets from the influential series, Uncommon Places, as well as his playful postcard project, Greetings from Amarillo, “Tall in Texas” (1971). For that project, he placed his own – often deadpan – photographs of American buildings in the postcard racks of tourist shops and sites in the cities he had visited. As time goes by, Shore’s formally rigorous images of an everyday America, once dismissed as boring by contemporary critics, have become signifiers of yet another disappearing America. Even yesterday’s formal detachment can become today’s nostalgia.
A decade before Shore, Ed Ruscha’s photographs of Los Angeles in the 1960s were giving form to what often seems like an architectural sprawl. Ruscha’s series of vast parking lots, taken from the air, show repeated motifs – arcs of cars, rows of trees, spirals of intersecting freeways. JG Ballard, obsessed with the dark fantasies of everyday English suburbia, was an early fan.
One wonders what Ballard would have made of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s documentation of the fast-disappearing industrial architecture of the Rhine-Ruhr region of their native Germany – water towers, gasometers, blast furnaces – and the almost identical structures built in France, America and Britain in the postwar years. This is the birth of a particularly European kind of almost scientific typology, and it was at the Becher’s Dusseldorf School that Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky honed their respective styles. The former’s bleak West German streetscapes, made in the 1970s and 80s, show how – in certain cities – postwar redevelopment was ruthlessly efficient but utterly characterless. It is salutary to see a single British landscape included here – Clinton Road, London (1977) – and to be reminded that great swaths of London in the 70s looked like London in the 30s: bleak, soot-blackened, forlorn.
It is almost a relief to encounter Gursky’s epic eye in all its manipulated detail. His vast image of a block of flats, Paris Montparnasse, 1993, which was built by the modernist master Jean Dubuisson to house 5,000 residents, is painterly in its composition and illusory in its scale. The sense of linearity and almost endless repetition was created by seamlessly merging two separate shots, but, even in its vastness, the detail offers a wealth of human activity in the glimpsed interiors.
As might be expected, Constructing Worlds intrigues as much for what has been left out of the narrative. Simon Norfolk’s elegant ruins of war-torn Afghanistan make the cut in a nod to the architecture of conflict; but not Donovan Wylie’s ambitious Watchtowers’ series, which ranges from south Armagh to Kandahar and makes apparent the relationship between occupation, surveillance and architecture. Guy Tillim’s post-colonial African ruins are in, but his fellow South African Mikhael Subotzky’s dramatic project, Ponte City – in which the view from every door and window of the Johannesburg towerblock is recorded alongside the revealing detritus left by residents – is not included.
It is, of course, impossible to explore every aspect of the relationship between architecture and photography in a single show, but I struggled to grasp the underlying approach, not least when the groundbreaking American New Topographics movement of the 1970s is all but overlooked. Curiously, Lewis Baltz is central to Campany’s catalogue essay, but his work absent. And where is Robert Adams, whose long exploration of the manmade suburban environment, combines formal rigour with a pioneering eco-political undertow that is missing here?
For all that, it is good to see Luigi Ghirri, an influential Italian colourist, having a moment. Ghirri’s collaboration with architect Aldo Rossi in the 1980s was unapologetically cerebral but also playful. In his search for “a new way of describing architecture”, Ghirri used form and colour in subtle new ways, allowing Rossi’s spaces such as the cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, to emerge in a fragmentary, but formally unified, way. The sky – and the tiny skyline below it – is glimpsed though a square of concrete in one image and allowed to dominate the entire frame in another. A red-brick tower appears in a small window frame as if painted there and reappears as a monumental object in another conceptually linked photograph. Quietly mischievous, Ghirri makes us look closely at how an architect works – and thinks.
One image lingers in the head long afterwards: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s long monochrome exposure of the World Trade Centre made in 1997. In it, he transformed the twin towers into a shadowy memorial before the epochal event. After all the concrete and steel, the everyday and the epic, it is a dark reminder that all that is solid melts into air.
Constructing Worlds is at the Barbican, London EC2, from 25 September to 11 January. Details: barbican.org.uk
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