Photo Week Profile: Benjamin Tiven

I must preface this profile by saying I began writing this before reading HT's profile of Jason Oddy and decided I ought to read it before posting to ensure some sort of continuity of tone. I was struck by the similarity in subject matter but shocking difference in the reaction each evoked. When viewing the world through the lens of Benjamin Tiven, I see a world where chaos has resolved into symmetry, decay and motion has been halted, and absence no longer signifies loss. He chooses subjects (abandoned islands, forgotten fields and factories, ruins overlooking the sea) which once held life but now are still and empty. Despite this, there is not a sense of loss; the photos are at once elegiac and joyful. There is a sense that Tiven has not lost anything but has found an oasis of stillness. It is the world after Rapture -- Time has stopped, everyone has left, and Tiven has inherited the Earth. However, the photgrapher, meek, is also absent. When I view this images my mind knows that some agent shot these photos, stood in these structures, and strode on these fields. But the silence and stillness is so complete that these obvious, logical facts become unbelievable. The quiet is so absolute it seems impossible that it has been or ever will be disturbed. Tiven creates a Utopia for the agoraphobe and some hope that a world without us might not be such a bad world after all.

But more than any of this, I love these images because of how they make me feel. There is something about them that evokes a nostalgia for my rural youth, the art I tried to make in college, and inexplicably, math rock and hardcore. I see them and I hear "How Nothing Feels" and feel a longing to visit this world, if only for one frozen moment. But to invade this space would be to destroy it and in knowing that, I know loss. If anyone would like to start a "Buy MD the Governors Island series" fund, I certainly wouldn't stop you either. [check out Benjamin Tiven's work here.]

Photo Week Profile: Jason Oddy

Other than a few nights in which I've found myself looking intently but defeatedly at the half-empty glass of whiskey in front of me, I've been staring almost exclusively at Jason Oddy's photographs for the past two weeks. GNF first introduced me to his work a couple of years ago, and I had a brief email exchange with him regarding a photograph that I wanted very much to have in my possession. The image was of a rundown Soviet-era sanatorium, taken from inside the window of another sanatorium building; part of an entire series of photographs featured in a 2001 issue of Metropolis documenting Soviet sanatoria now falling into ruin, the photograph grabbed me immediately and fully in its interweaving of textures, colors, content, and elegiac, (false) memory-filled faraway-ness. Although the price tag was way above my then-graduate-student means (even with a friend-of-friend-discount), I haven't stopped dreaming idly about the image, and about Oddy's oeuvre in general. Now that I've found his website, I can't help but continually scroll through the images and sigh pretty much nonstop. Oddy's work has taken him inside not only empty Soviet sanatoria, but also the UN headquarters in Geneva, Guantanamo Bay, the Pentagon, even the cluttered, unraveled homes of the recently deceased . Looking through his photographs, one is immediately struck by the absence of people -- of faces, movement, exchange -- of what we might understand or register as life. At the same time, these aren't landscape photos, or even photographs of places. Rather, these images compel a direct viewing of these spaces as place, as space constructed by and for humans, for life. And as such, they speak to the ways that space comes together to create, reflect, and perpetuate 'culture' in all the ways we might know and/or experience it. In his site, Oddy writes that "In the photographs .... I have treated architectural space as a cultural artefact, one which not only reflects but which also seeks to create historical reality." Seen in this way, the photographs feel less cold or removed than they seem stripped down to the basic questions of how space (or rather, the overt, conspicuous configuration of that space) dictates how we interact in those realms. And, across different projects, we can see overlaps in design -- how ideologies, regardless of content, similarly seek to impose order on its subjects, most fundamentally through the ways that the spaces they occupy compel specific kinds of interactions and daily exchanges. How ideologies, essentially, prescribe social relations. I could write about how Oddy's photographs are elegantly minimalist in their composition and colors, or how it just might be the case that he finds those spaces as-is, and simply has an amazing eye for capturing power or order, or its seeming absence, in their starkest, most essential states (and I do believe it's the case that both are true with regard to Oddy's talent). But there's something else at work here, something that makes these photographs entirely Oddy's, but also entirely ours, too .... And I think it has to do with the familiarity of it all, how we can imagine the kinds of relations determined these spatial configurations. How these settings bring power to life -- literally, but also figuratively, in the sense that they call our attention to the potency of architecture itself, and how we need not be in hallowed halls of multinational authority in order to experience the potency of constructed , designed space. The photographs depict, at heart, narratives of power, and how power in turn narrates the past, present, and future, in sometimes overt ways and in other instances through much more subtle channels. How it doesn't have to feel like power in order for you to be caught within it, organized by it. How power doesn't have to be an insidious, evil, demon-like cephalopod, its tentacles reaching everywhere, to nonetheless be present. And how that presence is immediately felt through its architectural manifestations. To be sure, I'm no Foucauldian, lets-intervene-in-the-ways-that-power-becomes- institutionalized-and-ritualized-in-daily-life sort of acolyte or anything. I don't think Oddy photographed these realms with a mind to present them as an immediate, always-already sort of critique of space and power. What is intriguing about Oddy's work is that in spite of its minimal, stark colors and tonal contrasts, there's still this strange nuance, this quiet trace, that one can find in all of these spaces. Their familiarity might have something to do with this feeling that, however removed they are from our own experiences, we can nonetheless sense that lived-in-ness. People become who they are in, through, and by these spaces, for better or for worse. I was already deeply in love with Oddy's oeuvre before I read his artist's statement, and well, that's when I nearly lost my shit. Near the end of his statement, Oddy quotes my favorite line from Sebald, the thing* about how grand buildings already speak to their inevitable decay. (I love that line. My dissertation would be nothing without that line.) Oddy then remarks: "A number of the places I have photographed represent some of mankind's most far-reaching attempts to systematise the world. Yet here as nowhere else we see how all such attempts are inscribed with their own failure. Hubris makes us reach for Utopia. Reality, in the guise of time, sends us back ruins." Oddy's Waiting Rooms series documents not ruins in the conventional, Roman-Empire-esque sense of the word, but rather the unraveling of architecture over time, an unraveling experienced on an individual level, but a ruin all the same. These spaces are not the endpoint of architecture -- I don't think that Oddy is necessarily suggesting through these photographs that all space comes to the same end, or that it comes to an end at all, or that we should look upon them as the future of, say, the Palace of Nations or the Pentagon. I think, rather, the contrast is between the attempt to systematise and the reality of living, of what it means to inhabit a space: the ruin is not in the decay but rather in the attempt at order itself; the endpoint of Utopia is the return to daily life. In the case of the Waiting Rooms series, depicting the cluttered spaces of the recently-deceased, that daily life continues: notice the depressions in the sofa cushions from years of wear, or the knick-knacks on the mantle, no doubt the accumulation of presents, souvenirs, and mementos over a long period. These objects reflect and inform our everyday existence, and become an integral part of what defines, for each of us, 'place.' There is little difference, in that sense then, between the painting of the fighter jet in the Pentagon conference room and the framed collage of photographs perched on the mantle. What stories do we want our spaces to tell? What kinds of narratives influence, and are then perpetuated by, current architecture and design? Oddy's photographs have got me thinking. A lot. But even more fundamentally, they've got me sighing. And, truth be told, desiring. I mean, these are spectacular photographs. If anyone would like to start a "Get HT That Sanatorium Photograph" fund, I wouldn't stop you. Ahem. * "...for somehow we know by instinct that outsized buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins." [check out Jason Oddy's work here. Seesaw magazine also did a piece, Seats of Power, compiling his photographs of chairs and sitting areas.]

My Favorite Photos (or: Memory, Ruins, etc.)

For many years I took photos almost exclusively with an old Nikon FE that my father bequeathed to me once he had upgraded -- or rather, retro-graded -- to his original love, a Pentax K-1000, which had been a replacement for his first Pentax, stolen several years earlier. I still love my Nikon FE. Manufactured in the late 70's/early80s, it's a sturdy SLR, a camera's camera, with proper metal parts and a nice, but not unmanageable, heft. Some of my best photos were taken with that camera, including the one above, of Jimmy and Ian, cousins (to each other -- not me!) who live on the tiny island of Islay, off the western coast of Scotland and home to the best scotch on the planet. One rainy morning, while waiting for the bus in tiny Port Ellen to take me to the island's wee capital, Bowmore, Ian (the bespectacled one) and I struck up a conversation: Ian: What are you waiting for? Me: The bus to Bowmore. Ian. Ah. Me: What are you waiting for? Ian: Eleven o'clock. Me: What happens at eleven? Ian: [points down the street] Pub opens. The next thing I knew, Ian had convinced me to take the 12:30 bus and in the meanwhile join him and his cousin Jimmy at the local pub. There, at eleven in the morning, about a dozen men were already sitting at little tables drinking wee glasses of vodka+lemonade. Ian ordered me a whisky. I protested, pointing out that it was, well, before noon. Ian's response: Ah, it'll set you straight for the day! I haven't been the same person since. In late November 2005, I received a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX9 as a dissertation-completion gift from NM and AFN. The gift came as a wonderful surprise, as did its digital-ness -- I had been cautiously avoiding entering into the world of digital photography, partly out of "real film" loyalty, and partly because I honestly had no idea which camera to buy. But, presented with the lovely Lumix -- with a Leica lens, no less -- well, there I suddenly was: nearly technologically at pace with the rest of the world. Finally. I celebrated by sleeping with an ex who was visiting from out of town, and then accompanying him the next day to Fort Totten, an old, Civil War-era military installation near Bayside, Queens that's still occasionally used by the Army and Coast Guard for training drills. [There's a Fort Totten park that's open to the public, but the base itself is fenced off -- email me if you want info on how to get in.] 18 hours after receiving my first (and only) digital camera, and some 8 hours after rolling out of bed with an ex, I took this photograph: It's probably the best photo I've taken with my Lumix (click on image to enlarge). I'll leave it up to you to make some quip about exes and decay. It is perhaps no surprise that my favorite two photographs involve whisky and ruins. But in thinking about Photo Week, I realized that what I loved about taking those photos was not simply in the capturing, but also in the possibility of sharing them. I'm trying to avoid some hokey conclusion about photography and community, but I will say that as we seem to get inundated with more -- and faster -- means of collecting and processing information, it's nice to sometimes slow down and just kind of ... stare ... at the image you might have in front of you. The best photographs require you to take them in a bit -- so we here at probably awkward hope that you'll join us in slowing down, sitting back, and taking some time away (er... for the most part) from our usual pomp and snark. Back to our regularly-scheduled ironic vs. irate cagematch as soon as this heat wave is over.

Collective, Unconscious: Ruins, So Very Tragique

We -- and I speak here for what I can claim to understand, which broadly speaking is "western society" -- are a narcissistic, self-aggrandizing lot. We believe not only in progress, but also in our inherent ability to make it. Moreover, we approach and explain instances of decline with a scientific and analytic (im)precision that cannot help but contain slightly paternalistic moralizing: oh you crazy, pillaging, marauding barbarians, what were you thinking?! In stern, Stone Phillips-y voices laden with gravitas we scold ourselves when confronted with harbingers of future catastrophe, but in the same instance grandly proclaim We Can Change The Present Course of History Because Our Serious Tone Suggests Knowledge and Insight And Maybe Also Condescension Because Even Though We Caused This Mess We're Still Better Than Our Predecessors Because They Surely Must Have Pre-Caused This Mess And At Least We're Trying To Fix It And While We're Fixing It Let's Also Make Some Fun Blockbuster Movies About It So As To Transform Those Harbingers Into Easy Cash Cows. So when both 3 Quarks Daily and Gothamist made mention of a recent article in Scientific American entitled An Earth Without People, I couldn't help but be curious and also a little wary. The article is partly an interview with science writer and professor Alan Weisman, who recently published The World Without Us, a book that examines what sorts of things would happen to the planet if humans suddenly disappeared, alien abduction-like, from the face of the earth.* Without regular maintenance, streets and highways would buckle within a couple of months; houses and office buildings would collapse within several decades. And: "Certain common plastics might remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years; they would not break down until microbes evolved the ability to consume them." Crazy! As a bonus, for NYC-based readers, you might be interested in looking at the "Fall of New York City" timeline featured in the article; it's got some pretty fascinating facts and images of a suddenly-humanless Manhattan, including flooded subways (2 days), the collapse of the Brooklyn Bridge roadway (300 years from now), and my favorite, 5 billion years down the road: "The earth vaporizes as the dying sun expands and consumes all the inner planets." Whee! The article was an interesting read overall, and Weisman's intent with the book is, ultimately, pro-environmental in nature, as it attempts to lay out what sorts of toxins, pollutants, and radioactivity we are (and would be) leaving behind -- though he's got a funny way of getting us to think about any of this to begin with: "What I’m finding is that this way of looking at our planet—by theoretically just removing us—turns out to be so fascinating that it kind of disarms people’s fears or the terrible wave of depression that can engulf us when we read about the environmental problems that we have created and the possible disasters we may be facing in the future. Because frankly, whenever we read about those things, our concern is: Oh, my God, are we going to die? Is this going to be the end? My book eliminates that concern right at the beginning by saying the end has already taken place. For whatever reason, human beings are gone, and now we get to sit back and see what happens in our absence. It’s a delicious little way of reducing all the fear and anxiety. And looking at what would happen in our absence is another way of looking at, well, what goes on in our presence." It's an interesting premise: eliminate how we die to discuss what we leave behind. I probably wouldn't describe anything I do as a "delicious little way" of doing anything, but that's just me. I don't have any fundamental issues with Weisman or the article, though the topic of abandoned landscapes did remind me of something I had first seen in bldg blog: Gunkanjima Island. It's a tiny island off the western coast of Japan that had been just an overgrown reef, until folks found coal deposits in the early 19th century, and subsequently began to migrate to the island to start a small coal mining industry. "Befor [sic] long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together. Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship -- so the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island." By the turn of the century, Mitsubishi had purchased the island, and established a long-term project to tap the coal resources from below the sea bottom. The coal mines eventually closed down in 1974 following a gradual shift from coal to petroleum as the central component of the country's energy policy, and by April of that year, all of the island's (human) inhabitants had departed, leaving behind "the empty shell of a city." A Japanese photographer documented the last days of the (inhabited) island, and then returned ten years later to see what had happened to the the buildings and surrounding mining structures. The photographs are visually stunning, and as documents of life, and then of absence, they offer a different way of thinking about ruins. That is, we might possibly read ruins not necessarily as sublime, romanticised relics of a time long gone and through (and for) which we now express nostalgic longings for the past, but rather the depiction of a more recent past -- in this case, the end of an island's sole industry and reason for human habitation -- as the catalyst of a process we would otherwise never see: the extent to which our absence from those spaces makes apparent just how much we rely on industry to govern when, where, and how we come together as a collective, and how quickly that collective can dissipate once market forces dictate otherwise. The complete departure of the island's inhabitants was precipitated by the decline of the mining industry on the island, but with the collapse of that market, the local economic infrastructure could no longer be sustained -- and with that, the end of the Gunkajima. To be sure, there are other instances and experiences of abandoned cities -- Chernobyl comes to mind here (Robert Polidori's photographs of the city and neighboring Pripyat are quite poignant, as are these from bldg blog) -- collectivities and local economies wiped out by larger forces, natural or otherwise. But, unlike the ruins of the Roman Empire, which we look upon with tragic awe and, more often than not, a moralistic stance against the decadence and power grabs that, if the narrative is to be believed, caused its downfall and its unfolding in the present as beautiful decay, the ruins of Gunkanjima speak to a more immediate unfolding of corporate bottom lines masquerading as national priorities -- decadence, sure, but the recent-pastness of it all makes the ruination more acutely felt, less able to be abstracted into an experience of the sublime. Somehow though, in the collective imagination, a ruin is a ruin is a ruin: at the end of the day, it's all decay. There's a great line in Sebald's Austerlitz: "...for somehow we know by instinct that outsized buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins." This speaks in one sense quite directly to Albert Speer's plans for a re-imagined Berlin under a victorious Third Reich, such that all new buildings should be designed with an eye to their potential as aesthetically pleasing ruins a thousand years later -- his theory of 'ruin value' that I'm pretty sure hasn't been entirely abandoned today. But in another way, buildings need not be outsized or monumental for there to be the potential for ruination. All good things (and bad ones) must come to an end; the problem is that we like to fetishize what that end looks like, reify that moment into an image of a ruin, without wanting to really look at the unravelling that got us there. In other words, it seems that we're willing to look at ruins without really, truly looking at decline; in the same way that one tends to gloss over the fighting that leads to the end of a relationship and instead monumentalize (ruin-ize) that moment we call The Breakup, in privileging ruins we choose to see an aesthetically appealing moment in a narrative we would otherwise like to forget. The beauty of thinking about a world without humans -- and skipping over the part about our sudden disappearance -- is that we're ultimately also able then to gloss over what it might truly mean to be a civilization in decline. Don't get me wrong: I'm all for understanding, and assuming responsibility for, my role in, say, global warming and perpetuating general environmental mayhem; it's not like I want humanity to be in a state of decline. But at the same time, it seems that we need to think about decline in more rigorous ways, and not simply as a necessary binary to progress. It becomes a sort of mythical beast, a Decline Monster that must be vanquished if progress is to march forward -- and as such, the monster is never truly real, never really confronted. It's all just sort of make-believe -- like progress itself. The thing with images of actual ruin, then, is that we can either confront the decline and decay that they depict as image, as something with potential aesthetic value (I'm certainly not above thinking that the photographs in these post are, in fact, beautiful) -- or we can think about how the traces of a now-absent collective might (or should) speak to what sorts of structural change need to happen, in order for the paradigm to shift from mythologized progress/decline to real sustainability. We can't avoid ruins, now or in the future; but if we can confront what it might look like to be in a state of decline, I suspect we might also then be able to then find ways to not so much want, need, or produce more (-- and monuments speak to this problem), but rather to want, need, and produce better. [Photographs in this post are taken from Saiga's website about Gunkanjima Island. There is also a piece in a 2002 issue of Cabinet Magazine that details some of the history of the island, for those who might want to read further.] [*And yes, I know about, and am planning to see, that ridiculous-looking Will Smith film, I Am Legend, about the last man on Earth. I'm a sucker for the apocalypse.]

Because Who Doesn't Want to Whoop Someone Else's Ass for Me?

It occurred to me today, while sitting in the dreaded middle seat on a jetblue flight to Los Angeles, that a majority of the non-contributing readers of this blog are architects. Asian architects. I have no profound theory about why this is the case, but to FT, CC, and the rest of my merry architecting readers from the Orient, hello! You have reminded me that my presence in Los Angeles over the next few days means that I will be missing this probably very insider-y but still very insightful convergence of thinking/building types at Postopolis, a five day conference-slash-meeting-of-the-architecturally-inclined-blogging-minds, hosted by the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Ongoing discussions of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design will ensue! Live blogging! There might be some military historians in the house! Lebbeus Woods! Crazy Mark Wigley! Lawrence Weschler! A DJ! Anyone who thinks they might be the slightest bit interested in such an affair should wander past Kenmare street and report back to me. I am very sad to be missing it. It would've given me the opportunity to potentially spar with one Jeff Byles, the author of Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition; many moons ago, he wrote a piece on ruins in The Believer, and to this day I still get a little tense whenever I think about how asinine it was. And so now I'm sad that I won't get to attend Postopolis and verbally whoop his ass. So to all you architects and/or folks interested in architecture and/or folks interested in intellectually sparring with Jeff Byles in my stead -- please head over to the Storefront and let me know how it goes. Intelligent, multidisciplinary, polymediated discourse on urbanism seems sort of hard to come by these days. [And if you can't/won't make it, then you can do what I've had to do, and just read the live blogging itself: City of Sound, BLDG BLOG, Inhabitat, and Subtopia, the four blogs that curated the goings-on. Enjoy!]