Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age @ Barbican, London

Review by Sacha Waldron | 04 Dec 2014

We don’t often do reviews of London shows but sometimes the occasion warrants it. Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age runs at the Barbican until 11 January and it’s well worth using the holidays as an excuse for a jaunt (or to escape the family), as this is one of the best exhibitions you will see this year. That’s just an opinion, of course, but it is the right one.

The exhibition brings together 18 photographers from the 1930s to the present who deal with the representation and perception of architecture. Progressing through the show, layers of influence and collaboration are revealed; we see how a whole community of photographers and architects is built from the seeds of each other. Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott are the earliest photographers on show, both making work in the 1930s. Evans was on assignment for the FSA (Farm Security Administration) during this period, undertaking a survey of rural America as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal initiative. Abbot was on an initiative of her own making, arriving in New York from Paris. She became fascinated by the city and the radical changes that were occurring in the built environment. In 1935 she persuaded the Federal Art Project (part of the Works Progress Administration) to commission her project Changing New York, and in her images we see the Rockefeller Centre under construction, skyscrapers beginning to dwarf diners and shops below.

Evans' influence, particularly, on the next generation of photographers cannot be underestimated, with work from Ed Ruscha, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Stephen Shore all included. It is a rare treat to see Ruscha’s Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967), which sees him break from his ‘no-style’ style and photograph the parking lots from a helicopter. Elsewhere we find Thomas Struth, a student of the Bechers' (another student, Andreas Gursky, pops up later on in the exhibition), with his typological examinations of his urban environment. In contrast are Julius Shulman’s sumptuous high-colour shots of modernist living in post-war California. Blue blue pools and golden bodies; these images not only document architectural change, but sell a lifestyle.

The downstairs galleries take the story out of America with Iwan Baan’s puzzle-like images of Venezuela and Nadav Kander’s misty visions of the Yangtze River. Simon Norfolk takes the viewer all over the world, touching on sites of modern conflict, and Luigi Ghirri’s images of Italian architecture have a touch of the uncanny to them, half futuristic, half fairytale.The highlight of the whole exhibition, personally, comes towards the end in the haunting images from Hiroshi Sugimoto. His silver gelatins, semi-blurred shots of modernist monuments, require the camera lens to be set to ‘twice infinity.’ It is possible to get lost in his images; once-harsh structures are seen through a haze. We see the romance of the structures, the vision and the memory.

Until 11 January, Sat-Wed 10am-6pm, Thu-Fr- 10am-9pm, £12. Closed 24/25/26 December

http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery