By Belmont Freeman
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I entered the photography galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view the exhibition After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age, I was immediately drawn to a large picture of a strange-looking building — a modernist concrete and glass tower of modest size with an improbably cantilevered superstructure, in a park-like setting at the edge of a forest. The structure is banal yet vaguely sinister, with the aspect of a laboratory or security facility, a clandestine purpose suggested by the surveillance window at the apex. A woman sits nearby on a bench, reading, seemingly unconcerned about what might be going on inside the facility. The blank-eyed building looks like it might be abandoned — or perhaps it’s just Sunday, and nobody is at work inside. My guess was that this was some cold-war era installation, like the bizarre 1970s hen
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Soviet structures that Frederic Chauban photographed so evocatively for the book Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed. I read the wall label: Untitled, 2009; Filip Dujardin, Belgian, born 1971; inkjet print ... Google SketchUp, Photoshop ... [1] » Slowly it dawned on me that this was not a photograph of a real building but a total digital fabrication. I was shocked, not in a moralistic way but, rather, with amazement at the masterful deception and amused pique at being fooled. I wasn’t prepared to find a digital image of this type included in a photography show and, after some reflection, I was disturbed by the implications. In the architectural profession this sort of rendering or 3D modeling is, of course, used routinely to show how a structure might look if and when it is built; but to represent a totally fanciful architectural design as if it actually existed is an activity of a radically different kind. With a jolt I came to see that the crafts of architectural rendering and photography have now merged into a common activity of digital image-making — so completely that, as demonstrated on the gallery wall, one can conceive a work of architecture and produce a “photograph” of it without having to go through the expensive, tedious and corrupting intermediate step of actually building the building. Welcome to the world of architectural photography without architecture. [2] » The power of today’s digital imaging tools is dramatized by comparing Dujardin’s fantasy with a 1999 work, in the same exhibition, by Craig Kalpakjian (American,
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born 1961). Corridor II depicts an eerily lit hallway with monochromatic, utilitarian finishes and boxy ductwork exposed on the ceiling, transporting the viewer to the featureless bowels of an office building or hospital. A pure digital construction, the piece is totally convincing as a “photograph.” The image clearly reflects Kapakjian’s minimalist aesthetic and intent, and the airless vacancy of the space is what creates the disquieting mood; but at the same time, the level of abstraction in the work is consistent with the fledgling media (Form Z, Lightscape) available at the time. In contrast, Dujardin’s work is populated with totally realistic materials, building components and equipment, rendered in meticulous detail and brought to life with naturalistic light, shadows and reflections. It is an image that could not have been produced in 1999. The idealized representation of un-built buildings is stock trade in the architectural profession, and architects and their hired hands are expected to produce seductive images of their projects to sell the designs to clients or to persuade the public. Such renderings — whether hand drawings, watercolor washes or digital images — are accepted as necessary intermediary steps in the real work of the architect, which is to get the project built. Likewise we have the parallel tradition of paper architecture: the graphic representation of architecture that is unlikely to be built, either as a speculation on a hypothetical ideal, as a polemical exercise or simply as a creative outlet for the designer who lacks clients. Many an exceptional talent has come to public attention, and brilliant career launched,
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