Candida Höfer is a member of a famous circle of German photographers that has Andreas Gursky as its brightest star, Bernd and Hilla Becher as its origin, and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as its locus. Like the other members of the circle, called the Becher circle, Höfer has a magnificent obsession. For the Bechers, it was industrial structures; for Gursky, it is the depthless and yet dizzying spectacle of capitalism; for Höfer, it is interiors of public or social spaces. Because people are almost never captured in Höfer’s photographs of these spaces, the title of her show, which is presently at the Frye and traveling across the U.S. with the intent purpose of directing toward Höfer some of the attention that has been lavished on other members of the Becher circle since the early ’90s, is Architecture of Absence.
The title is misleading in two ways, both of which result from the word absence. One: Absence implies silence, and silence welcomes contemplation. Meaning: There are no people in these images, all is quiet, now is the best time for you to contemplate space—the shadows shaping space, the light illuminating space. The root of the word absence tells us to stop, look, and receive a soft impression of a pure architecture suspended in silence. But Höfer’s photographs are not silent; they are instead very musical. You can actually hear her compositions in the way that American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was able to hear in his inner ear the music of buildings and interiors that stimulated him. Architecture is often called frozen music. When Le Corbusier saw, for the first time, in 1945, Manhattan from a descending commercial plane he said, “It’s hot jazz in stone!” What makes architecture musical is its rhythms—the rhythm of windows, pillars, balusters, buttresses, steps, ducts. And the leading motif of Höfer’s photographs is the repetition of fixed or free interior elements.
Those who only can see space in Höfer’s small- and large-scale color photographs are basically deaf. Recognizing just the space is much like recognizing just the silences in a piece of music. In Palacio Real Madrid I 2000, for example, the pronounced rhythm is that of the chairs rowed on either side of a long table in a royal dining room. In Schindler House Los Angeles VII 2000, the beat of the modernist interior is up on the wooden beams. In Universität Amsterdam 1991 we find the visual equivalent to Elvin Jones’s polyrhythmic drumming (Jones used to describe the sounds produced on a drum set as colors). The pillars to the right play one beat, the beams overhead play another beat, as with the chairs, the windows, the red curtains, the TV sets, the images in the TV sets, the tiles on the floors—all of this tapping, thumping, drumming rising from the wall near the middle of the image. Then there’s the Spiegelkantine Hamburg IV 2000. The photograph, which is of a dining room for a German news-paper, is not only rhythmically vibrant but has what looks like a wall of speakers with naked woofers and a ceiling that’s covered by the kind of cones sound engineers use to insulate a studio and protect a recording from outside noises.
The second thing wrong with the word absence is the very fact that the absence of humans does not in the least diminish the humanity of these interiors. And as the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre wrote in The Production of Space, “humanity is the social practice [that] creates works and produces things.” What we see in Höfer’s photographs are hard (concrete, iron) and soft (wood, cloth) materials jelled by human energy. Absence has a negative charge, while Höfer’s works are positively charged—they affirm the human, the users of these spaces structured by the political and social relations that govern daily life. We must stay away from vague expressions like “aura of absence,” “transcendental rooms,” and “ghostly human presence.” The function of such expressions, which are everywhere in the book that accompanies the exhibit, is to release a mist between the architecture and the viewer, and to infuse the walls, staircases, and windows with souls that the viewer can never grasp or apprehend. The truth of the matter is this: These corners, these chandeliers, these floors are full of us. We are everywhere in Höfer’s photographs.
