Nineteen Rooms for September 11, by Jill Magi; part of InSite: Art+Communication

In our September issue, we closely consider the task of memorializing both Ground Zero, and the events of September 11, 2001. Philip Nobel wonders if the official memorial at ground zero sufficiently addresses the memory of the event, while a photo essay documents the DIY and ad hoc monuments around the city—raw expressions of New York’s grief.  But for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, institutions and individuals are finding their own ways to explore and come to terms with the memory of the traumatic event:

Ten Years After 9/11: Remembrance and Reconciliation Through Poetry, by Poets House; part of InSite: Art+Communication

InSite: Art+Commemoration
Through October 11, New York
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited artistic and community response to a decade of recovery and change in Lower Manhattan. You can find their listing of performances, poetry, and ideas on their web site, which also acts as a repository of some of the artistic works. Read more…

Norman McGrath at the exhibition of his work. Photo: Magda Biernat.

On June 2, “An Eye on Architecture,” a show of Norman McGrath’s photographs opens at the New York’s Center for Architecture where it will run until June 25th. Responsible for taking some of the most memorable images of the built environment, the veteran photographer is often mentioned in the same breath as Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman. Fellow photographers like to talk about how he “gets the essence of a building,” his proficiency in “capturing the texture of a structure,” as well as his knack for “making very small interiors spatially interesting.” Norman is known for mentoring young photographers, for his selfless sharing of information and techniques. As Stan Ries says of his oldest friend and mentor, “I am honored to be able to help curate his work so that it becomes well known to a younger generation of photographers and architects.” On the occasion of the opening and to mark Norman’s 80th birthday, I put some questions to him about his work in observing and recording architecture, changes in technology and approach, and memorable imagery.

Susan S. Szenasy: Some of your most memorable images of architecture, for me, come from you film phase, especially the black and white prints. What is it about black and white photography that is so eternally appealing?

Norman McGrath: When I was originally drawn to the field of architectural photography it was for the most part a black and white medium. Color was something of a novelty. Large format photography in color was largely confined to the advertising arena and much of it accomplished in studios. The best quality of color film was Kodachrome but that was confined to 35 mm cameras, less well suited to the documentation of architecture. 4 in. by 5 in. view cameras were considered the ideal tool. This type of camera offered the most control over the image of this essentially static subject. Read more…

Julius Shulman knew everybody. That’s how he worked. He moved through the city not merely photographing, but orchestrating and choreographing images that helped define what it meant to be modern and in Los Angeles through the buoyant optimism of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. He kept it up until his death in 2009.

In the new book Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis, authors Sam Lubell, West Coast editor for the Architect’s Newspaper, and Douglas Woods have assembled a collection of Shulman’s rarely seen works that document the burgeoning city as it became a metropolis. In fact, because of Shulman’s willingness to shoot anything and accept any photographic challenge, this collection constitutes a definitive sweep through the visual history of Los Angeles. Read more…

Photo: Tomas Kauneckas.

Lithuanian photographer Tomas Kauneckas has an important message to tell us all: don’t play with water. That message is the title of his photography campaign on water conservation that he and his team created in 2009. The photographs are still circulating as a cutting-edge campaign aimed at our global view of water consumption. Privatization of water, farm irrigation, and hydropower across the globe are causing alarming drops in ground water levels. More than 40 percent of the world’s population relies on rivers to supply water. More than 260 of those river basins are shared by more than one country. Ambiguous ownership of water rights is causing tensions that could lead to wars over water. Kauneckas illustrates this problem through his photography. He wants us to know we must prepare for this growing problem. His message is important, and we are inspired by his raw, graphic photography. We’ll let Kauneckas and his photos do the rest of the talking. Read more…

Since we posted the December 2010 issue last month, our cover story on New York City’s landmarked interiors hit the charts (Most Shared Stories in web language) consistently. And no wonder. These memorable spaces add the kind of rich experience to being in New York that the iconic buildings crowding our skyline can only promise. These rooms deliver an aesthetic trip back in time, a trip that makes a visit here a truly memorable time. Though these theatres, lobbies, restaurants, and stores are public spaces where you can marvel at the detailing—its richness, its restraint, its exquisite sense of proportion, its materials—photographers have a hard time setting up their tripods in them. Access is grudgingly granted or often denied.  Obstacles can be daunting. This is the story of one such adventure.

Documenting this crop of landmarked interiors (including the Cunard Building, Film Center, Brooklyn Historical Society, Time & Life Building, Charles Scribner’s Sons Building) fell to photographer Sean Hemmerle. The tight deadline added to the degree of difficulty. As he tells it, it takes a village (in our case our editorial and art staff) to pull off such an assignment. So I asked Sean to find a comfy chair in his downtown studio, and talk into my Flip camera about photographing the Beacon Theatre, which ended up on our cover. He’s currently updating his website http://seanhemmerle.com/  where you’ll find full documentation of the shoot as well as his other shoots from the world over.  But for now, take a look at the image he took inside the Beacon, lit by only one light bulb, then compare this to what his camera captured when the lights were—seemingly miraculously—turned on.

 
The Beacon Theatre, lit by one lone bulb.

Cohen House, Siesta Key, Florida, Architect: Paul Rudolph. Photo: Ezra Stoller/Esto.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft—they all had their buildings “Stollerized.” To have one’s building photographed by Ezra Stoller was to practically ensure its place in the architectural canon, such was the power of the black and white images he created. Stoller worked in a way few architectural photographers before him had, waiting for days, watching the light move across the surface of a building, studying it deeply before he clicked the first photograph. The crisp and clear pictures that resulted made him the ideal photographer of the Modernist movement in the 50s and 60s. Read more…

The 2011 TED Prize-winner is the artist who goes by the tag, JR. His enormous photographic installations obscure the facades of buildings, overlay streets, and sometimes collage to cover clusters of buildings in one massive broken image.

While some shy away from calling his work “street art,” I don’t see any shame in this—especially given the clear social justice objectives inherent in the imagery. It presents the faces, literally but never as cliché, of invisible and overlooked peoples. In this way, it is street art in the best sense of the term. You walk into the street and there it is and it has something to tell you. It takes buildings and turns them into indexes of shame, embarrassment, nobility, hope—whatever you might associate with the everyday struggles of the displaced lower-classes. Read more…

Last month, Metropolis editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy noted the extraordinary attention that Auburn University’s legendary Rural Studio has received, including the PBS documentary, Citizen Architect. Now, Mix ‘n’ Match, a photography exhibition that opens this week in downtown New York, shows that inventive architecture was not all that came out of that intensely creative place.

At the same time that the PBS documentary was being made, photographer Cynthia Connolly was at the Rural Studio, processing her photographs in a dark room that she built for herself in a barn. 40 of those photographs will now be displayed at The Quality Mending Co., where they will be re-arranged by a new guest curator every two weeks, along with the other objects in the store. The images are of the natural landscape and built environment of the Alabama Black Belt – the context within which the Rural Studio was conceived.  Its founder Samuel Mockbee encouraged his students to “Proceed and Be Bold,” to go forth into the communities around the Studio, and build for them.  Connolly’s photographs of signs, buildings, barns and trees, are an intimate examination of precisely those communities, presented in an innovative and bold format that Mockbee might well have enjoyed, and showing us another side of that utopian architectural experiment.

More details of the exhibition on our online events listings.

Oil Field #13, Taft, California, Edward Burtynsky

In last week’s Q&A with Susan Szenasy, the organizers of the CoolClimate Art Contest spoke of the role of art in raising awareness about ecological issues. In a similar vein, Ecoaesthetic: The Tragedy of Beauty is an art exhibit that hopes to do for sustainability what war photography does for the cause of world peace: shock us into caring. On view at the Exit Art gallery, in New York, until August 25th, the exhibit brings together the work of nine photographers whose viewfinders have discovered the disturbing beauty of ecological disasters. The images are haunting in a way that is surprisingly reminiscent of pictures of children in war zones. There is the same sense of innocence lost, bringing on an urge to do something.

Ecoaesthetic is the first show organized as part of an art initiative called Social Environmental Aesthetics (SEA).  Conceived by artist Papo Colo, the SEA hopes to build a permanent archive of art that addresses social and environmental issues, and will organize related exhibitions, lectures, and public events at Exit Art gallery.

Here is a little taste of the images on view at Ecoaesthetic: Read more…

As much as we love to read around here—and even though we rely on the printed word (and the e-printed word, or whatever you want to call it) for our livelihoods—by some Friday afternoons, we’ve reached our limit; it’s all we can do to drag our text-saturated eyeballs across another line of type. If you’re feeling about the same—and a quick nap isn’t an option—then perhaps a video diversion will help. And we think we have just the thing: a collection of time-lapse architecture videos from around the Web. Read more…