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tcd24
The Transparent City Details |
© geoff manaugh, from the essay "transparent
city."
When Michael Wolf and I first sat down to discuss
the images contained in this book, Wolf pointed out one
shot in particular. Like the photographer in Michelangelo
Antonioni’s classic film Blow Up, Wolf had found himself
working late in the studio one night, going over a batch of
recent photos from Chicago. The photos were of buildings,
of course—very large buildings, with lots of windows, like
J. G. Ballard’s high-rise. At some point in the evening, Wolf
zoomed in randomly on one of the windows while scanning
the image for flaws. But he noticed something: there
was a man in the photograph—and he was giving Wolf
the finger.
Inspired by the find, Wolf went back through every
photo he’d taken in the city thus far, methodically scanning,
passing from one window to the next, row by row,
as if deciphering a hidden text. In that newly committed
act of visual interpretation, a key aspect to the project was
born: when you look into the lives of others, the lives of
others might be looking at you.
I asked Wolf about this, about zooming in through
112 megapixels onto a window that might have filled a
mere two or three percent of the original photograph, only
to see, through a haze of pixellation, a face or a hand or
a group of people at a conference table, talking. It’s as if
the photograph contains its own universe, I suggested, a
blurred microcosm of grain and circumstance, and if you
have a powerful enough camera you can actually climb
inside. Between voyeurism and photography, then, what
is to be discovered when you’re out there watching windows?
Wolf, perhaps unsurprisingly, replied:
"What I found, actually, is how boring everyday life is. When I thought
about it, one of the fantasies that I had was that I would get up onto
these
rooftops every night—for four or five or six hours—and I would look
into hundreds of windows, and I would see all these thrilling things
going
on. But, ultimately, all I saw was either people sitting and reading or
people sitting in front of a computer. In the condominiums, it was
people
sitting in front of big flat-screen TVs eating dinner—and there were a
lot
of people alone.
It was like an Edward Hopper painting. In fact, I was greatly influenced
by Hopper, taking these photographs—even walking along the
streets at night and looking into restaurants. It was almost a cliché.
You’d
see these Nighthawks-like scenes at eleven at night—two people sitting
at a table discussing things or a waiter wiping a table—and so Hopper’s
paintings were in my mind while taking these. But it was a little sad to
see, night after night, in all these buildings, that it was really
just single
people between the ages of twenty-five and forty, tired after work,
sitting
on the sofa watching TV. I was a bit disillusioned. I thought it would
be
more exciting than that."
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