The
This sense of being invited into, or having landed in, the world of Höfer’s photographs is central to their uncanny effect. Looking at her unpopulated interior views—frequently shot from oblique angles that suggest passing glances rather than definitive visual summaries, and full of furniture, fixtures, and objects that appear to be quietly waiting for someone—viewers may feel as if they’re wandering through a world in which everyone has simply vanished. Electrical outlets and carpet stains are suddenly infused with an odd significance, for in this world without people (or, per the exhibition title, in this “architecture of absence”), objects and incident become active participants in some sort of strange, unscripted drama, communing with one another and the architectural containers they fill. If we are of this world—for we all use train stations and go to museums, after all, perhaps the very same ones we see in these images—Höfer makes us feel that we are nevertheless alien to it, that we’re trespassing on a secret life of spaces and things.
This is a peculiar and delicate
achievement. Höfer doesn’t work through a strategy of explicit estrangement (as
in the modernist tradition of László Moholy-Nagy or Aleksandr Rodchenko, say,
wherein architectural forms become barely recognizable, nearly abstract);
rather, she locates the inherent strangeness of the most deadpan realism. Here
is the headquarters of
These are certainly not the terms
with which Höfer has described her own work. Despite her decades-long focus on
public interiors, primarily in the
It was in its obfuscation of any
such broader implications of Höfer’s photographs that the Norton exhibition, it
must be said, fell short. One could not help but feel that the curators, who
worked closely with the artist in organizing the show, had accepted Höfer’s own
reading of her work a bit too credulously: Beautiful to a fault, the exhibition
situated Höfer as above all an accomplished maker of lushly scaled, smart,
crystalline interior views, as if Andreas Gursky had ditched the digital
effects and taken a summer job with Architectural
Digest. Driving this suggestion was the show’s disproportionate selection
of photos taken since the late ‘90s, when Höfer began using a 6 x 6 cm
Hasselblad and tripod for much of her work. With this development (and her more
recent use of an even larger format 8 x 10 camera), Höfer’s images have become
increasingly painterly in both scale and detail, largely forgoing the shabby
idiosyncrasies of her earlier shots to concentrate on summarizing views of
immaculate, even monumental, interiors. Such were the photographs that
dominated the Norton exhibition: impeccably shot and grandly scaled images of
spaces that are, indeed, open, ordered, and just the right amount of gorgeous,
from
The inherent problem with curating Höfer’s work is that its specificity lies precisely in the heterogeneity of its seemingly homogenous project. Though other former students of Bernd and Hilla Becher, notably Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, have taken architecture as a primary concern, it is Höfer who has focused most intensely on the built environment for the past three decades; but in doing so, she has taken on such a copious subject (does she plan to photograph every lecture hall and library in the Western world?) and so studiously avoided the stylistic and technical consistency that defines most photographic typologies (like, say, the Bechers’), that what at first appears a steadfastly systematic project in fact reveals a kind of antisystem at its core. There is a craziness to Höfer’s interior images—that of an apparent logic that we feel almost able to grasp—that the curator’s ordering gaze necessarily attempts to restrict.
Still, fewer explicitly formal
pairings and a bit less elegance would have made for a more rigorous and evocative
exhibition, as would some inclusion of the loose strands of Höfer’s oeuvre. The
show was apparently intended as a monographic overview of Höfer’s interiors,
not a survey of her entire body of work. And yet one may legitimately ask
whether the interiors themselves can be fully understood when excised so
cleanly from the context of her practice as a whole—particularly here, in their
first major institutional outing on this side of the
The two and a half decades of photographs in “Architecture of Absence” tell part of this larger story. As contemporary as some of the interiors they depict may appear, the images all feel somehow dated, like remnants of an age just past. In one of the Norton’s galleries, two photographs representing the Hamburg and Maastricht university libraries, respectively, were hung on neighboring walls: Hamburg’s hulking card catalogue, looking like a set of abandoned boxcars in the library’s classically appointed skylighted atrium, seemed to mock the postmodern pretensions of its recently completed Dutch counterpart, as if to suggest that the latter’s elaborate skeletal structure and miles of shelves would soon appear just as outmoded, victim of an age of electronically stored and accessed information in which students barely know how to locate a book. Both structures, like the Beinecke and the Morgan and the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (old and new) and the New York Public Library and the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig, stood in the exhibition as emptied monuments, relics of an era that believed in the instantiation of knowledge and its collective pursuit, only to see both—knowledge and collectivity—dispersed into an endless flow of dematerialized code.
Höfer’s interior photographs, finally, appear as a kind of archaeological record of Enlightenment modernity, in all its shabbiness and beauty and promise. The accomplishment of her work is both to provide this record, however provisional it may be, and, more significantly, to confront us with the very premise of its necessity. Absence connotes loss—and it is this, I think, that ultimately permeates both Höfer’s practice and the architectural spaces that comprise it.
Graham Bader is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in art
history and archaeology at