The book itself is nearly 11×14 inches in size and is an absolutely fantastic collection of Mr. Wolf’s photographs which he took in 2007. Normally you don’t imagine what a building looks like; say the office building you work in when you’re sitting inside doing your job. Wolf fills the imagination with a Hitchcock flair for the mundane but at the same time his images offer a sharp look inside the grid where many people spend a lot of time. The image on the cover, silver gray light covers the windows on one side of a skyscraper and on the other side a yellow fluorescent light bleeds out of a few floors of offices that are still occupied. There are windows with shades drawn; some left open, and sometimes people are sitting at their desk staring at a computer screen. You forget that you’re sitting in a tiny box when you occupy your office in a high rise; Wolf takes the idea of life in a cubicle to an extreme.
There are amazing images in this book, the double page spread shots that are just the buildings themselves, the perfectly aligned windows, sometimes the sun is setting and resulting reflections are amazing. There are close ups of people, sometimes intentionally blurred out, other times they are placed inside the geometry of the urban landscape, an arm or a leg. They might be in a conference room and one floor above them the building is still under construction. These images are often surgical; the telephoto lens Wolf uses offers him the opportunity to keep his distance while painting an image of chilly reality. I’m reminded of Andreas Gursky’s work, and I would imagine these pictures would be very effective if blown up mural size and hung in a gallery. They would become even more atmospherically mind-blowing if you could walk into a world where you just saw this landscape.
-JR
Recent Comments