March 26, 2018In Southampton, on the East End of New York’s Long Island, the Parrish Art Museum has mounted a fascinating show examining the intersection of architecture and photography. The exhibition includes Samuel H. Gottscho’s New York City views, RCA Building floodlighted, 1933 (photo © 2018 Estate of Samuel H. Gottscho/The Museum of the City of New York). Top: Torre David #2, 2011, by Iwan Baan (photo © 2018 Iwan Baan)
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The acclaimed Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron came up with an ingenious design for the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York — a long, low-lying modern barn that opened in 2012. The airy simplicity achieved was a middle pathway between the Hamptons penchant for the shingled farm vernacular of old and the area’s more under-the-radar history as a hotbed of contemporary forms.
The structure itself has now helped inspire a brainy exhibition titled “Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture,” on view at the Parrish through June 17. (It then moves to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville.)
“It sprang from my visits to the Parrish,” says the show’s curator, Therese Lichtenstein. “I started to think, ‘Wow, this would be a fantastic place for a project.’ ”
Lichtenstein — a photography expert who taught at New York University before decamping to the Hamptons to teach art at the private K-12 Ross School — has done extensive work on German photographer Thomas Ruff. She knew that in the 1990s, Herzog & de Meuron began to commission Ruff to document its buildings. That got her thinking.
“How do we come to understand our relationship to the built environment?” she asks. “The show is about looking at images and how our imaginations and desires get stimulated by looking at them.”
The 57 photographs in the exhibition, spanning from the Depression to our own time, are by 19 artists, including Ruff, Berenice Abbott, Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky and Samuel H. Gottscho. Many are in black and white, long a preferred choice for capturing the essentials of a structure.
The City and the Storm, 2012, by Iwan Baan. Photo © 2018 Iwan Baan
Any show with a list of names that diverse likely has more on its mind than just a lineup of pretty pictures — although these pictures are pretty indeed, and will suffice if that’s all you want from an afternoon at the Parrish.
But look deeper, and you’ll see that “Image Building” wants to complicate our view of the medium of photography, not to mention our view of the buildings we live and work in. As the Parrish’s director, Terrie Sultan, puts it, the show demonstrates how “photography transformed itself beyond just a recording of actual fact to an art form.”
She points to an exchange that happened at the Parrish’s opening: Iwan Baan, who has made a stellar career of capturing buildings for magazines and architects themselves, was commissioned to take pictures of the museum, and Sultan referred to him in museum materials as an “architectural photographer.” Baan — represented by three photos in “Image Building”— requested that he be called simply a “photographer,” without the modifier.
“That’s the crux of this show,” Sultan notes. The two mediums, photography and architecture, are useful to each other at times, but they have diverging agendas.
Luckily, they diverge in fascinating and beautiful ways. Lichtenstein says her intention is to look at the “symbolic function” of the images on display, and one of the richest veins in the exhibition is the high-modern, mid-20th-century moment captured by Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller and Balthazar Korab.
TWA Terminal at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport, Eero Saarinen, New York, NY, 1962, by Ezra Stoller. Photo © 2018 Estate of Ezra Stoller/Esto.
Case Study House No. 22 (Los Angeles, Calif.), 1960, by Julius Shulman. Photo © 2018 J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
If you close your eyes and think about the Case Study houses of Los Angeles, you’ll probably see Shulman’s Case Study House No. 22 (1960), with its classic scene of a woman enjoying a cocktail party while perched inside a cantilevered corner of a home designed by Pierre Koenig, the glittering city seen beyond her.
And Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal — a structure so iconic that it’s in “Image Building” twice — is best conjured as it was depicted in lush blacks, whites and grays both by Stoller, in 1962, and Korab, in 1964.
Lichtenstein notes that such pictures were commissioned by magazines to “sell the post–World War Two lifestyle.” But the Case Study designs, although influential, were expensive, and most never got built. And the TWA terminal, long since decommissioned and surrounded by the airport’s Terminal 4, is becoming a hotel.
“Everything changes,” says Lichtenstein. “The photographs become a reflection on time passing, and the eventual notion of ruin is embedded in them.”
As a commentary and corrective of sorts, the exhibition features four images by the lesser-known Lewis Baltz taken a decade or more after the ones by Stoller et al. Also in black and white, Baltz’s photographs are abstracted details of tract houses in Los Angeles. Some measure only five by eight inches — intentionally modest both in subject and form and a way of looking twice at the contours of the American Dream.
One of the least famous names in the show may be a welcome discovery for certain viewers: Luigi Ghirri, an Italian who lived and worked in the Emilia-Romagna region in the latter half of the 20th century. Like his contemporary Stephen Shore, also represented in “Image Building,” Ghirri took what should have been nothingburger views — a streetlight and apartment building on a foggy day, a rolled-down metal door on a storefront in Modena — and turned them into moody meditations on how we live.
Rockefeller Center, 2001 (left), and Seagram Building–Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1997 (right), both by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Both photos courtesy of the artist. © 2018 Hiroshi Sugimoto. Images courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco/ Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Our memories of important places are often hazy, and the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto brilliantly riffs on this phenomenon in Seagram Building (1997) and Rockefeller Center (2001), both of which Lichtenstein includes. In these works, two of New York’s most important landmarks are rendered in rich black and white — but blurrily. Sugimoto seems to be suggesting not that this is how the skyscrapers actually look but that this is how your mind may recall them.
As for which is more real, if that question occurs to you as you view the show, then “Image Building” will have achieved exactly what it set out to do.
