I was so pleased to go to this exhibition especially after my reaction to the Drawn by Light exhibition. There I found the work fascinating and was glad to have gone but left feeling a little bewildered by it all. For me the Constructing Worlds exhibition was really well curated and I left with a sense of having been to something cohesive, informative and also profound. To look at how human beings express themselves through the way we organise and build our environments was fascinating and compelling. What was so interesting too was the vast differences and range of habitats and cultures we humans exist within.
I was lucky that I had been reading about the prolific French photographer Eugene Atget a couple of days before the study visit - as one of the tutors pointed out in the talk afterwards his work might have been included at the Barbican since he is really one of the first major recorders of architecture and environment. His work was not there but Berenice Abbott who had worked with him in Paris before heading back to New York was and he was a major influence on her.
I've jumped ahead though as the exhibition starts with Walker Evans and it was brilliant to see his work having read so much about him and seen his name so often this last year as I make my way through various books and documentaries. There is a famous portrait of the farmer's wife which was so wonderful to see: in it you see the whole of her life in that face from the infant within her to the old lady she will one day become, presumably quite quickly due to the hardships of her existence. There are also details from inside the houses and one photograph in particular struck me which was of the farming couple's bed - long, long before Tracy Emin created her unmade bed. Evan's photographed this seemingly mundane piece of furniture and although there is very little else in the image it seems to suggest so much about who the people are. The way it is set at an angle, the simplicity, the weapon up on the wall behind, the tiny glimpse of another bed nearby (as was the norm prior to our affluent lifestyles nowadays whole families shared sleeping quarters throughout most of our history and still do in many parts of the world - separate bedrooms for each and every member of the family is a very modern expression/habit).
Then back to Berenice Abbott who photographed NYC at a time when it was still really being built - there are so many contrasts, the poverty and claustrophobia of the tenements as well as the hope in newly built tenements, set against the hubris, ambition and excitement of the skyscrapers and bridges that surround them. Aside from being a wonderful record of that time the photographs convey so much about the people who were existed there - there is such a strong flavour and sense of NYC, you can almost smell it and hear the people living there. I just loved the Court of first model tenement house in New York, 72nd Street and First Avenue, Manhattan, March 1936. The way she has composed that photograph is really something - I could look at it for ages.
Out of Thomas Struth's room I was so interested in the image of Clinton Rd, London 1977. (Not that I am Londoncentric or anything.) I thought about Elkin's book and how he discusses that photography can show us life being uninteresting and I thought about how interesting this uninteresting aspect of us is. The photograph shows a simple London Rd with cars and a train line at the end. Nothing is happening, there are no people, there is no decisive moment and yet you get such a strong sense of place - I read that photographs might be thought of as memory traces and in this particular photograph I get such a strong sense of Struth's memory trace of that place and that time. Again, you can really feel the environment come alive as you look at that photograph. It's very powerful. That's what is so interesting for me - feeling the buzz of absolutely nothing going on at the surface of life when looking at a flat black and white representation. About his photograph of Shinju-ku, Tokyo, 1986 I have merely written 'WOW!' in my notes and looking at the accompanying book I bought I can see why - it's an incredible statement, both the architecture itself and the photograph. And his Buskoe Dong, Pyongyang, 2007 photograph immediately bought to mind E.O Wilson, a sociobioligist who is the world's leading expert on ants and who has likened their societies to our own. Looking at these huge structures in Struth's images reminds of ants, termites, 'organistic' creatures who operate as a whole in much the way it has been suggested we do, despite out current (desperate) individualistic self-perceptions. (I'd love to read more about Wilson's theories but the book I ordered is in some sort of inaccessible storage; from the tiny little bit I've read about him he suggests that ideas can 'travel' from one area of society to another without any direct contact as we exist as a super-brain organism in much the same way ants do - sure I've oversimplified things here - must get hold of that book!)
The idea of a photograph being a 'memory trace' was also really evident when looking at Stephen Shore's work. His Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21st, 1975 says so much about the American psyche - the huge Chevron sign which dominates the frame and points down to the ground looks like some sort of talisman or, if thinking about ancient societies such as Egypt where huge structures were erected to signify gods, the godlike presence of oil and the car in that culture.
The car and its salience in US culture also dominates Ed Ruscha's fascinating flat arial images of structures surrounded by vast car parks. He manages to photograph these places while they are empty and seen from the viewpoint of above he demonstrates now man has such a tremendous impact on the landscape. Parking Lots: Dodgers Stadium, 1000 Elysium Park Ave, 1967/99 is an extraordinary photograph; the patterns made by the empty car park and stadium are really quite beautiful and magnificent and I feel that Ruscha is celebrating as well as questioning man's ingenuity and conscious expression.
When I first started to get into photography I went to see an exhibition at the Tate which included Bernd and Hilla Becher's work and I was a bit confused by it I must admit. But looking at it now I understand their desire to show how human beings create artwork even when building functional, ubiquitous structures. Ruscha seems to be doing something similar - finding the art where no art was consciously intended; something that is perhaps so unique to human beings. What is it about us? Why do we have this innate need to create, even when we're building things that are seemingly mundane such as a water tower?
And sometimes we aim to build something beautiful, it goes wrong but ends up being rendered useful anyway, and then beautiful by a photographer who comes along and sees and then records the miraculous such as Iwan Baan who has taken such amazing images of the doomed Torre David complex in Caracas which was built but never finished but has been utilised anyway in the most ingenious way by people who needed somewhere to live. This miracle of a community have taken that unfinished and abandoned building, used left over bits of building material to make it as habitable as possible in new and interesting ways and have created a whole city where you can find shops, a gym, homes, and common areas which are looked after by the people who live there. It's a such an amazing story and a fabulous set of images that celebrates humanities good points as well as highlighting our follies.
I also loved looking at Simon Norfolk, Guy Tillim and Nadav Kander and really, really loved the formalism of Lucien Herve's work. In fact there is so much work to look at in this exhibition that I must admit I feel I ought to visit again. I could not concentrate for the amount of time that is needed to see and absorb all this work.
I think the exhibition is excellent. It gives you a very clear and robust sense of how humanity shapes and exists in the world. All of the work is powerful in different ways and all of it not only records architecture but also asks questions about our place here, about how we shape the landscape and why, and about what these structures and how we use them say about us. I loved this exhibition.
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