Placed in a line, one after another, the encyclopedias are like immutable cycloramas, prodigious projectors whose reels have gotten stuck and which show, with a kind of maniacal fixity, a landscape which, because it is condemned to be only and for all eternity what it was, will at the same time grow older, more decrepit and more unnecessary. - Jose Saramago, The Cave, p.51
Stiftsbibliothek Klosterneuburg III, 2003 digital c-print
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris VI, 1998,
60 x 54 cm
Discussing the work of German born photographer Candida Höfer will usually prompt any writer to make note of her underrated status among the other artists associated with the Becher school (who include both Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth) , but they will also be sure to inventory her subjects: pristine interior shots of museums, libraries, auditoriums, theaters, chruches, etc. In the traveling retrospective Architectures of Absence [on view at the Frye Museum in Seattle, WA through April 16th] - complete with monograph and the first of its kind in North America - we have the chance to absorb this photographer's impulse to wander the face of the earth in search of places built throughout human history, places whose partial functions are to provide us with a certain sense of being-together. As Höfer herself has stated: “I photograph in public and semi-public spaces that date from various epochs. These are spaces available to everyone. They are places where you can meet and communicate, where you can share or receive knowledge, where you can relax and recover.”
The Standard Los Angeles III
2000
120 x 120 cm
C-Print
What these photographs slowly reveal, then, are spaces whose meaning resides less in the objects one might find inhabiting them (books, chairs, coffee tables, paintings or statues) than in what should inhabit them – what has or has yet to inhabit them: the human subject as it meets, gathers, and moves about in the world. In this sense they are photographs that document our changing ideas of how to accommodate social space itself; variegated spaces both new and old poised between the story of their history and the writing of their present. Visibly or invisibly, her photographs always emerge with the trace of someone having been there in that particular space; a chair can often be seen out of place or the carpet visibly worn. The silence and order that architecture would like to bestow upon its space becomes uncannily interrupted within these images by that background of being inhabited which perpetually haunts them. Surely we have all walked into empty rooms of this kind where there is a buzz in the atmosphere just before a seminar, the quietude of the theater before a performance, or the attentive ear that hears the first footsteps along the hallway of a vacant library. In this way they are also the kinds of public spaces which trade place with the private - unmistakeably alive with the rythms of the social and the open, they simultaneously remain saturated with the intimate and personal. Indeed, we sometimes go to the museum for no other reason than to be alone.
Spiegelkantine Hamburg V, 2000
C-Print
152 x 152 cm 
The spaces that Höfer has chosen as her subjects over the past thirty years can then all be said to share a common feature: what they might lack in their ability to change the way we see the world, they can more than make up for in the ways they ask us to pay attention to what we do while we are here; within what other time and where. And just as the photographs so often depict the interiors of spaces where things are catalogued and stored (such as the library and museum), so too do the photographs taken as a whole come to resemble a catalogue themselves. It is a catalogue that skirts the mere document to provide us with an archive of these places and their existence, transformations, and preservation. They are spaces where the rhythms of life play out, where both work and product are allowed to comingle. And because they immediately bring to mind their function and its attending human presence yet all the while display an absence, the images by nature become double. One could imagine that within them someithing is always about to take place or has just taken place…Hovering outside of time, they partake of a certain reversibility as images with two sides or a circuit, like the crystal-images of cinema Deleuze describes:
There is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo or a postcard came to life, assumed independence and passed into the atual, even if this meant that the actual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo, following a double movement of liberation and capture. - Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 68
Trinity College Library Dublin I 2004
C-print
180 x 215 cm; 70.87 x 84.65 in.
Standing before Höfer’s photographs we are not necessarily in the position of voyeur, admirer, or contemplator of the image, but more as an inhabitor of the spaces in the images themselves. In this sense, the viewer is invited to retain a position of inbetweeness similar to the out of focus photographs of Uta Barth, which when looked upon place us as the would-be in focus subjects of a blurred background. Here, confronted with the large format works which often echo the monumentality of the interiors they depict, we can hang around and enter these rooms. From photograph to photograph, a kind of infinite growth takes place where rooms open onto other rooms – a journey whose labyrinthian quality is one of insides that are outsides having no outside. The more reason to linger, then. Perhaps even to sit in a chair that we forget to return to its ever-so-perfectly aligned position with the others.
Schloss Sankt Emmeram Regensburg XXIV
2003
155 x 204 cm
C-Print
The uncertain traces left by events are not the only marks on (or in) space: society in its actuality also deposits its script, the result and product of social activities. Time has more than one writing-system. The space engendered by time is always actual and synchronic, and it always presents itself as of a piece; its component parts are bount together by internal links and connections themselves produced by time.
Leferbve, The Production of Space, p. 110
The indispensable opposition between inside and outside, as indicated by thresholds, doors and frames, though often underestimated, simply does not suffice when it comes to defining monumental space. Such a space is determined by what may take place there, and consequently by what may not take place there (prescribed/proscribed, scene/obscene). What appears empty may turn out to be full – as is the case with sanctuaries, or with the ‘ships’ or naves of cathedrals. Alternatively, full space may be inverted over an almost heterotopic void at the same location (for instance, vaults, cupolas). The Taj Mahal, for instance, makes much play with the fullness of swelling curves suspended in a dramatic emptiness. Acoustic, gestural and ritual movements, elements grouped into vast ceremonial unities, breaches opening onto limitless perspectives, chains of meanings – all are organized into a monumental whole. - ibid., p.224[…]
ETH Hauptgebäude in Zürich C-print 24 x 35 cm
Monumental qualities are not solely plastic, not to be apprehended solely through looking. Monuments are also liable to possess acoustic properties, and when they do not this detracts from their monumentality. Silence itself, in a place of worship, his its music. In cloister or cathedral, space is measured by the ear: the sounds, voices and singing reverberate in an interplay analogous to that between the most basic sounds and tones; analogous also to the interplay set up when a reading voice breathes new life into a written text. Architectural volumes ensure a correlation between the rhythms that they entertain (gaits, ritual gestures, processions, parades, etc.) and their musical resonance. It is in this way, and at this level, in the non-visible, that bodies find one another. Should there be no echo to provide a reflection or acoustic mirror of presence, it falls to an object to supply this mediation between the inert and the living: bells tinkling at the slightest breeze, the play of fountains and running water, perhaps birds and caged animals. - ibid., p.225
The dread of doors that won’t close is something everyone knows from dreams.- Benjamin,
The Arcades Project, p. 409, [L27]
Plush – the material in which traces are left especially easily.Ibid, p.222, [I5,2]
