Taking Place
Taking Place:
Photographs from the Prentice and Paul Sack Collection,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
June–September 2005.
Imagine a real estate developer with a good eye and deep pockets who collects photographs according to the rule that each must have "somewhere within it a building that could be owned or leased." An exercise in vanity, one might think, but one redeemed by the collector's steadfast refusal to include photographs of the sort found in glossy architectural magazines. Instead, he selects the work of great photographers who loved buildings for their possibilities: William Henry Fox Talbot, Édouard Baldus, Eugène Atget, Berenice Abbott, and many others.
The collector finds himself with a dazzling set of photographs but, in a twist invented by Oscar Wilde, many of them portray ruins. Ruins from time's passing, from war's catastrophes, from weather, from neglect, even from the developer's wrecking ball. These photographs of ruins have the effect of making others in the collection that show buildings in their glory or even under construction (all of them worth owning or leasing) appear on a course of inevitable ruination. Whether by artful design or unconscious intent, the collection comes to read as a memento mori, a reminder that the built environment is fully complicit in our knowledge of decay and death.
This fable is one way of reading the collection of photographs assembled by Paul Sack recently exhibited as "Taking Place" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The most compelling images in the Sack collection are those of buildings, from Lewis W. Hine's 1931 shot of the Empire State Building as a steel skeleton under construction through Robert Eaton's 1853 photograph of ruined columns in the Roman Forum. This fable also identifies the exhibit's weakest pieces as (by and large) images of people that make no compelling reference to place, such as those by Clarence H. White or, in a very different style, by Diane Arbus. Included in the exhibit under such rubrics as "Progress and Its Discontents" or "Inhabitants," these photographs seem unsituated, cut off from the constructed spaces of life, and none the better for it.
In its photographs of buildings and built environments—mines, factories, railroads, bridges in their setting—the collection catalogues the classic elements of architecture and construction. Some of the most arresting focus not so much on entire buildings as on their constituent parts, like columns, arches, windows, doorways, passages, and the like. In his perceptive essay for the exhibition catalogue, Alan Trachtenberg observes how many photographs of buildings have been shot through windows, including the two originary images of photography: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Gras (c. 1826) and Fox Talbot's Latticed Window in Lacock Abbey (1835). To which one must add, from this exhibit, the photograph-haunting when taken in 1968 and now unbearably more so—by Danny Lyon for his great archive of loss, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan. This image, taken from deep within a room in a condemned building, shows a door leaning against the wall and a window frame lying on the floor, and then beyond them through a window a cityscape of commercial towers. A ruin about to be razed to make way for the precincts of the World Trade Center, it occupies a site that would a generation later become our unforgettable image of ruin in a contemporary city. Looking through a window with a camera never yields quite the single, isolated moment it seems to do; such photographs gain an afterlife beyond anything that their makers might have imagined. Studying Lyon's photograph today, one thinks of ruin upon ruin, all set within thirty-three years. Or, to return to the opening fable, one sees it as predicting the ruin of a developer's best-laid plans.
Photographs shot through windows replicate within themselves the act of looking through the camera's viewfinder or ground glass. They call attention to the photographed nature of the image, that it is framed through a lens rather than drawn or painted by hand. Other photographs in the exhibit use the arch as subject or as frame in ways that suggest photographers have stolen the architect's classic device for determining how people look at and through a building, as in Fox Talbot's Abbotsford Gate (1844), which shows a turreted manor house through its wall arch, or Tina Modotti's Convent of Tepotzotlán, Mexico (1924), which offers a composition of receding arches as austere as its religious setting. Just as the arch allows us to see through a wall or enter a building to glimpse its interior, so a photograph enforces a line of sight and determines how we must view the scene. The photographer's composition is an act of direction, perhaps even of coercion, because it denies us the possibility of looking elsewhere. In doing so, the photograph repeats the power of a building or site to direct how we will look at it. Buildings have a way of insisting, for example, that we look at their façade or entrance rather than their back, with its loading docks and dumpsters.
The power of architecture to focus the eye, and thus to direct the camera, is most shocking when the architectural element in question is the surviving columns of an otherwise destroyed structure. The columns sketch out the building's original form, they show the means by which it held itself up, and testify to its deconstruction. Depending on circumstances, such columns can arouse very different images in the viewer. Eaton's Roman Forum shows a grouping of six columns set against the low cityscape of Rome in 1853: the surviving columns tower over the surrounding buildings and the frock-coated man standing amid them. They suggest the slow passage of time, as both the decline of a once great empire and as the long endurance of the past. Whatever destructive forces were at work on this site, they belonged more to erosion than apocalypse, and they make for a winsomeness that would not have been out of place in a Victorian drawing room. Yet the composition of the photograph depends on the relation of these columns and their surviving lintels to an otherwise disordered city scene. What seem at first glance the evidence of destruction—columns—become the elements that frame the scene and give it coherence.
Eleven years later and in a very different place, George N. Barnard recorded the path of Sherman's March through Georgia with a camera. One of the most haunting images in the exhibit (though it is not reproduced in the catalogue) is his Destruction of Hood's Ordnance Train and Ruins of Rolling Mill, Atlanta, Georgia. All that remains of the ordnance train are its metal wheels, pair after pair of them stretching into the distance, testifying to the train's length and destruction. All that stands of the rolling mill are its chimneys, stark shafts of brickwork against the sky that outline the shape and size of the burned-out factory as do the columns in Eaton's Roman Forum. But in that shift from Roman columns to industrial chimneys as a means to mark out all that has been destroyed, photography moves from a mood-painting that evokes gentle melancholy to a documentary precision that records war's casualties.
Precisely because it is a coherent collection about buildings and sites, "Taking Place" offers valuable comparisons for showing how photographers have used a two-dimensional medium to explore what are by nature three-dimensional structures. Charles Sheeler's Side of White Barn (1917) turns the elements of the scene—roofing shingles, board and batten siding, six small panes of glass, a cemented foundation—into a study of texture and material caught in patterns of light and shadow. As an image of a building, it reminds us that the side of a barn is simply a façade, that is, a flat plane enlivened by differences of material but still a flat plane. A formally perfect photograph in many ways, Sheeler's image bears a striking similarity to the sheet of film in his camera, for both seem bound by the two-dimensionality of the image. Set beside it, Paul Strand's Barn, Gaspé (1936)—with its shingles, board and batten siding, one window—seems a less elegant imitation, a little too shaded in its various tones of gray to achieve the same luminosity. Another look reveals one simple difference—the window in Strand's image is framed through an open door on the front wall of the barn but in fact is set in the back wall and thus allows us to see through the structure. Strand renounces (explicitly, one senses) Sheeler's painterly celebration of the barn's two-dimensionality. Instead, he works with the possibility of light offset by darkness—the square window of light set in the vertical rectangle of the darkened door—to overcome the medium's limits. Anyone interested in photographing buildings can look at Barn, Gaspé for a very long time before appreciating all it has to teach about using light and shadow to suggest volume and depth across what seems a flat plane.
Another pairing of photographs from "Taking Place" suggests the ways in which photography depends on and yet sometimes suffers from an overreliance on painterly composition. Wright Morris's Untitled [Scythe by Shed] of 1947 shows a tightly cropped image of a farm shed with a larger structure in the background; the ground is littered with barely distinguishable junk and the scene suggests struggle, if not poverty. Breaking the scene's hardscrabble quality is a scythe leaning upright against the horizontal planks of the shed—and also its beautiful serpentine-shaped shadow. A lyrical moment in a rundown scene, the image celebrates rural life through visual echoes of Millet and other such painters. The problem here is the aestheticization of an implement that had become, by 1947, largely obsolete. Morris can't resist making us feel the beauty of the scythe and its shadow, and thus some sadness that this rural way of life has passed. Much more unsentimental in its depiction of rural life in the modern period is Walker Evans's Fireplace, Burroughs House, Hale County, Alabama (1936). This photograph, with the frame of a metal bedstead on its far right, shows a small fireplace at its lower center, with boots on its hearth and various objects on its mantel. These include a sentimental print of a mother and kneeling daughter detached (it seems) from a calendar, a small mirror, a bottle, a mug with what appears to be a brush in it, and a clock. The last gestures toward respectability, toward the elegant clocks that adorned the mantelpieces of parlors in more prosperous houses, just as the print gestures toward family portraits hung above fireplaces in those same parlors. And yet the use of space in the photograph makes clear the difference between this sharecropper's house and that of the wealthy, for it includes a bedstead as no formal parlor ever would. Evans is unsparing in his representation of the family's poverty and also of its attempts at ordering and decorating the building in which it lives. That the clock on this mantel is a cheap alarm reminds us that its owners are working people who live not by the natural rhythms of the scythe but by the pressure of the clock's advance.
In Fireplace, Evans portrays the lives of those who live within that house without including a single person, but they are nonetheless present through their objects and their arrangement of the room. The clock tells us that it is 12:46, the middle of the working day, and thus explains the absence of the Burroughs family. Many of the photographs in "Taking Place" show buildings and their interiors without people, yet still manage to give us a vivid sense of the lives lived within them. Atget is, of course, the great master of this mode of representing people by capturing the traces they leave on the cityscape, but other images in the collection deserve brief mention. Bill Brandt's Northern Suburb (1933) is unfortunately not included in the catalogue, but it shows rows of terrace houses in the English Midlands with a terrifying and blackened geometry that would have given Piranesi the creeps. The outside of these houses tells us more than we can bear to imagine of their insides. Berenice Abbott's The Construction of Rockefeller Center (1931) does contain one figure, but he is there to be dwarfed by machines quarrying the building's foundations out of Manhattan bedrock. In a brilliant reversal of the architectural photographer's usual image of the skyscraper as soaring into the sky clad in gorgeous metalwork, Abbott takes us down into the depths of the earth to remind us that buildings must connect with the ground below them if they are to stand for long. Here the caption is crucial to understanding the image: what seems a quarry is instead the beginning of a building that will capture the viewer's imagination when completed because it will soar upward. Yet even here there is a sense of ruination at work, of the bedrock itself that will long outlast the structure built into it.
"Taking Place" is full of remarkable images of the ways people have built, inhabited, neglected, torn down, and otherwise used buildings. Forget the collector's claim that each depicts a building that could be leased or owned, because who, after all, would want the shame of collecting rent for a sharecropper's cabin? Many of the buildings in this collection come with a record of exploitation attached to them—exploitation of those who lived and worked within them, of the land on which they were sited. They come, in other words, with the record of lives—and that is what separates the images in this collection from photographs in architectural magazines as they project fantasies about how we are to live now.
Thinking about the ways in which buildings and spaces contain and record the lives of those who inhabit them means acknowledging the presence of history. No photograph in "Taking Place" records the pressure of history more disturbingly than one showing a man dressed in black walking away from the camera on a day of light snow or sleet. He is in an urban setting, obviously European, with a two-story building above him that has a long balcony which leads in turn over an arch to another building. A figure climbs a staircase to that balcony, and yet another figure stands under the arch in the far background. All three are outlines, with no identifiable facial features. To the immediate left of the man in the foreground is a caged dove of peace, white against the surrounding darkness. The space, one feels, is confined and cramped; it has signs of poverty but not squalor. The formal composition of the photograph is beyond praise, as are its range of black and gray tonalities. From a strictly aesthetic point of view, it stands among the very finest images in "Taking Place."
Yet there is no possibility of maintaining that point of view once the caption is registered: Entrance to the Old Ghetto, Kraków (1937). It belongs to the set of photographs taken by Roman Vishniac as a record of the Jewish world he knew would soon be annihilated. Looking at this image in 2005, we know beyond even Vishniac's worst imaginings what happened to the world captured in that photograph. We know as fact what Vishniac could only fear, and yet this photograph stands as a prescient allegory of the Holocaust: the figure in the foreground walking toward the arch (and thus freedom) will be blocked from going through it; he will be confined like the dove in its cage. Looking at this photograph, one remembers the cliché that photography makes time stand still, and only wishes that it were true, so that the three figures in Vishniac's image would remain as he saw them in 1937, still alive and still able to walk through that arch. I can only surmise that Vishniac saw in the viewfinder of his camera exactly what would happen in the next few years, more clearly there than anywhere else. If you look long enough at his photograph, and realize that it cannot be shaken out of mind or nightmare, then you will realize that the phrase "taking place" has a meaning far more horrifying than those played with artfully in the title of this exhibit: that this site and its people have been forever taken from life, never to be rebuilt and returned.
Nicholas Howe’s last book was Crossing the Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin. He died in September of 2006 at the age of fifty-three.
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