I’ve been hiding.

Getting used to the short windows of free time I have these days.
So this site has been on the back burner.
You understand.

But I hope to get some images and thoughts up more often now that I’m a bit more settled where I am.

This series of hides and stands in the field is from German photographer Rainer Wengel.  I admire the unpretentiousness, the raw materiality, the impromptu nature of some of them, and the common need for a slightly more elevated survey of the surrounding landscape.

I know for me as child, I would never want to enclose myself, but to get higher. Trees worked well to some extent, but there was also that basic instinct to build with the branches lying around on the ground. And what better complement to a tree than a ladder and a platform?

“12 rooms”, photographed by Jeremy Blakeslee.

Not sure what the building is, or where, but I love the honesty of the rooms being documented as-is, and the straight-forward and repetitive composition. It’s really nice how the photographer’s framing places the architecture in the role of “control”, bringing out all the subtle changes in light and decaying detail across the 12 rooms.  You start to wonder if you would have really noticed all the nuances of a room if it hadn’t been compared so strictly to similar spaces.

It’s a great study in natural light, and a perfect example of statistician and infographic artist Edward Tufte’s principle of small multiples.

By the way, Christina and I recently picked up a copy of one of Tufte’s books, Envisioning Information… highly recommended.

Münich-based Marcus Buck made these amazing portraits of party walls. In each photo, we’re presented with a pretty common urban condition: the residual traces of a demolished building on it’s surviving context. 

Aside from the purely aesthetic genius of these unconscious works of art, the colors and forms on these walls are also a visceral reminder of the real contact that was once made to connect the structures. Not only have the interiors been protected from the elements, but they have gained the character and specific alterations of individual rooms and structural elements. 

When a data on a digital hard drive is deleted, it is not completely gone… There is a remnant of data left a a result of the erasure, holding bits of information about the contents of those files. In these walls I see that same evidence of life and function. Here it’s just so startling because so rarely do we actually see a physical section of a building in one-to-one scale.

And while totally possible in rural areas, its really a unique condition to the city. Whenever I come across these, I get a really bittersweet feeling… like an exciting signal of new growth along with a quietly exposed vigil of the building’s life and death. The secrets of section that are finally made public.

If the drama of posthumous architectural voyeurism doesn’t do it for you, maybe you can think of the visible remains of a building as a drawing. How often can can the architect visibly recognize his 2-dimensional work on the site? As the process of construction is inherently solid and perspectival, it can’t be read as easily a pure translation from the paper. With the combination of dense urban fabric and the indiscriminate act of demolition, you suddenly have an unveiling of the marks made years ago by contractors. So in fact the alteration of the party wall itself and years of interior customization literally create a physical poché, realizing an actual cut along the surface of the wall.

Thanks to Marcus Buck for the photos and Pruned for the link.

Related: Gordon Matta Clark

Matt Siber cleverly removes traditional written language from his photographs, allowing a purely graphic city to speak for itself.

From the artist’s statement:

“The Untitled Project” is rooted in an underlying interest in the nature of power. With the removal of all traces of text from the photographs, the project explores the manifestation of power between large groups of people in the form of public and semi-public language. The absence of the printed word not only draws attention to the role text plays in the modern landscape but also simultaneously emphasizes alternative forms of communication such as symbols, colors, architecture and corporate branding. In doing this, it serves to point out the growing number of ways in which public voices communicate without using traditional forms of written language.

The reintroduction of the text takes written language out of the context of its intended viewing environment. The composition of the layouts remain true to the composition of their corresponding photographs in order to draw attention to relative size, location and orientation. The isolation of the text from its original graphic design and accompanying logos, photographs and icons helps to further explore the nature of communication in the urban landscape as a combination of visual and literal signifiers.

In his project “A Spring in New York”, French photographer Frédéric Lebain imposes urban landscape upon itself in a contemporary nod to the surrealist concepts of altered perspective and irrational collage.

My question is, how long did he wait between exposures? Some of the prints look much more or much less weathered, more or less aged than their counterparts in the second photo, or in varying times of year. But it’s tough to tell whether that is a result of the artists delayed method, or the constantly changing environment of the city. In some places in New York, a scene could remain unchanged for years at a time, while others are in flux on an hourly basis…

Either way, cool project.

I would love to see these photos of photos printed, and back in the scenes again for a third exposure — and a fourth, and a fifth, etc… — gradually zooming out in scope, eventually to reveal the entire city from these specific lines of sight with successive incremental frames of view through time.

Maybe something similar actually happens with our real memory of someplace: older images and perceptions may be subconsciously overlaid onto the real place, somehow inset and attached to the scene. Yet that reality itself becomes yet another memory on the next visit, and repeated to the point where that place exists at so many scales in our mind that it forms a pastiche which comprises all that we know about the place.

Petur Thomsen is an Icelandic photographer who captures the impact of human consumption of the landscape, among other things.

His work is beautiful and tragic, highlighting man’s terrible and precise extraction of earth across Iceland. It reminds me of how powerful we are, and also how small we are to wield that power. There is definitely a beauty in the colorful trucks and tarps which sit in the mountains, but for me it’s a combination of awe and helplessness. One one hand I’m proud that we can achieve almost anything, literally moving mountains for our own benefit… but then again just depressed at the cost of it all. Sometimes I think the boundless ideas of man can easily surpass what is obviously our natural scale.

At least the pictures tell the truth about what’s happening.

It reminds me of an essay by W. G. Clark, called “Replacement”. Clark proposes that “building is the reconciliation of ourselves with the natural land.” Because we are largely incapable of living directly on the land, we engage in the practice of building to sustain our presence in a place.

Since our methods and scales of building have changed dramatically in the age of industry, we’re no longer faced with a small debt to the land. Instead we’ve had to resort to the heavy mining of distant places - landscapes which seem unimportant or out of the way - to acquire our material. No longer, or much less often, is a modern building made with material directly from its site. The question is, how can that building offset the cost of the damage?

In Clark’s essay, he cites the example of a mill from his youth. It was a building which deliberately obstructed the natural flow of the river, to allow the mechanized production of flour. The dam and mill house permanently altered the waterway, forming a large pond. To Clark, it was a necessary and respectful relationship, where the mill made a beautiful calm pond, and the pond made the mill work.

Since architecture involves the necessary destruction of terrain, it’s inevitable that the natural landscape will be scarred by man somehow. But when human needs for resources reach such a colossal scale as in recent times, the affect of our extraction reaches far and wide to places completely removed from the final work… It’s no longer a symbiotic relationship. Now it’s just taking from the land, without creating anything special in it’s place.

Anyway, sorry to be a downer… I just think it’s a case for more efficient construction and industrial design, and for builders to make sure they are making use of the landscapes they’ve destroyed.

C-prints by Christine Nguyen.

What I like about her work (other than the fact that it’s gorgeous and natural and elemental) is that it’s right on the threshold of drawing, painting, photography, and science.

She says:

..the photo-based work is a combination of drawing and a photographic processes. “Negatives” are drawn on layers of Mylar, which are projected onto light-sensitive paper.  The paper is developed in a color processor, creating a camera-less, photographic image. What you are seeing is a negative of the drawing. I use paints, inks, pens, pencils, and also grow salt crystals on the mylar to create my drawings…

Geez. Love that process…
Just taking your work and subjecting it to the optical rigor of projected light.

Makes me wonder what other artistic works have this kind of potential when put under the darkroom enlarger.

(By the way, I think they should have commissioned her to do the opening titles for Avatar…)

It’s when you find something like this in the city that you realize how important architecture is. When it confronts you as a raw and elemental work of art, which happens to function as a useful building.

Great textures, a wonderfully graphic tree, and just the right ratio of window to wall.

…and I love how deep this place feels. Maybe in a courtyard or something, full of old growth trees, light washing down from an overcast sky across wet stucco and sparse pine.

haunted houses are really just buildings that have gained the character of the lives of those who used and lived in them.

these buildings have seen the same people manifest their presence over and over through the course of their life. now, other than the person not actually being there anymore, why should the structure itself change to some anonymous place? in fact, they even acknowledge the loss of the inhabitant, aging and weathering without the preventative maintenance of their owners…

this for me makes it even more apparent that there was once someone who cared about the place - the juxtaposition of the well intended and sometimes grand structure with the state of dilapidation that now consumes it. maybe that sense of continued ownership is the “ghost” everyone talks about.

these photos were taken by Alex Jowett, and are part of his “Abandoned” series.

very exciting development by Frederic Gmeiner, Torsten Posselt & Benjamin Maus.

their project, “Extracts of Local Distance” involved building a program which assembles collages from a huge pool of images which are dissected and organized by common perspective viewpoints. the result is an interface which allows generation of a new architectural environment derived from the construction of vanishing points by the user.

it reminded me of a set of images by Laura Kicey which she called “Construct”, where she pulled fragments of architectural detail from her bank of old found walls… she was creating a new wall - an imaginary surface - but based in reality and directly stemming from her choices of composition and color.

where these techniques intersect is in the collection of conditions, the finding and cataloging of architectural moments in the world through photography. both of the methods allow a kind of representation of the world through fragmented assemblage, and offer an alternate yet familiar perception of the same things we’ve seen in reality.

but where the “Extracts” project differs from Laura Kicey’s work lies in the fact that it is almost completely generated by the computer. pieced are cut from photographs by an algorithm, cataloged with metadata with a script, and repositioned into place based on an rather arbitrary input from a user. the “Construct” series is decidedly different in it’s unmistakeable and imperfect human touch; the compositions are made with distinct consideration and taste which come directly from the mind of Laura Kicey.

now the question is, does it matter how it comes to be? can the computer generate a more attractive “space” than the product of the sensitive and vague thoughts of an artist?

obviously the technology is there, in fact in some ways it’s more efficient - in remembering meta data and calculating sheer thousands of positioning elements in seconds… but at the end of the day, does it even matter what the computer makes if it doesn’t contain the memory and contextual relevance of collages made by human hands?

anyway i definitely appreciate both ways, and applaud the guys above for innovating new ways to see the built environment and inventing new places of their own.