Impenetrable geometrical shapes, solids alien and resistant to nature, the living organism, the body. Yet the life of these images is not in their strangeness, but rather in the ecstasy of pure representation and the creation of an uncontaminated, uninhabited space: the ecstasy of one who looks into the distance and sees it as a place where the other, the alien, the distant inevitably happens. To see what is in the distance and feel that that vision is passed down to us: it is as though in the distance all spaces have the characteristic of watching the person looking at them. The principal result of that gift is the transformation of any space into a human space with its heuristics and the assumption that, rather than Euclidian, geometry is human: space, in order to be space, must be looked at, failing which it is an empty shell, a shapeless, invisible, imperceptible void.
The photographs of Candida Höfer are about the aesthetic qualities of space and their limits and the relationship with dimensions determined by architectonics or sculpture that is created by looking. Her choices are not directed by some kind of documentary, historical or cultural interest, nor are they postcards or investigations of the multicultural, global world we live in. Her driving force is above all purely photographic: she develops a strictly aesthetic programme in which her first principle is photographic objectivity, together with the ambition to create an objective, physical and verifiable record of ordinary things. Her preoccupation with the quality of the subject-matter of the photograph (the skills of photography itself) is a constant, in contrast to a certain contemporary tendency to over-value the image to the detriment of the photograph itself. It should be noted, however, that this is not a technical obsession, or, more accurately, this preoccupation with the highest possible degree of perfection is intended to achieve a greater freedom of form. It is only her mastery of her idiom that enables her to create unexpected inflections, prolongations and intensities: the field of work can only be enlarged by the mastery of the various tools with which she works.
This is a photographic style and manner governed by a thorough visual examination of spaces and the discovery of the best viewpoint, which means the discovery of the material point from which the world, things and, ultimately, we ourselves can best be observed. This is a physical location and not a theoretical or abstract position on the construction of the horizon. In Höfer's work the viewpoint, with its subjective, unnatural and pathological burden, is replaced by a kind of physical and material point of location. It involves adopting a specific Standpunkt that designates the geographical location where the photographer is physically positioned and from which what exists can be observed. This “place from where things are seen” is a construct, or, in other words, it is as it were a vantage-point providing an ample, wide-ranging and synoptic view. The image constructed in this position covers the generic whole of the horizon: the line of the buildings against the sky, the lines made by the streets on the ground of cities, the way the light penetrates the urban chain-mail, etc. In the case of the German photographer, these are empty internal spaces. If you take away the architecture and furniture there is no life left in Höfer's pictures (except her 1992 series on Zoological Gardens). The way she uses her vision, thereafter transformed into the subject-matter of a photograph, makes the perspective (and the subject-matter) sink into the visible stratum of the spaces and from this kind of mental gymnastics there arises (almost as if it were a painting) an extreme and delicate organisation of the field of vision.
I mean: the preoccupation with the kind of organisation and hierarchies expressed by an image (whether in a painting, a photograph or a video film) is a constant in any creator of images. The first historical example we have of this "creation of an image" which requires hierarchical arrangement, selection and separation, is that of painting, which therefore serves as a mould. In Höfer's case the choice of the location from which she takes her photographs is in fact made with a specific comprehension of the spaces she sees. For that reason her choices (exposure time, light, camera, lens) represents an election of aspects to be used to the best advantage in the pictures she produces and that scale of pictorial or, if you like pictographic values is the element that determines the final subject-matter (note the profound difference between a picture and a photograph).
It is not a matter of the original and unusual nature of her perspective. This ”place from where things are seen" is there for all of us: any of us could be that observer who makes choices, who is interested in some details rather than others, who finds delight in one kind of colour, etc. Candida Höfer's "places" are public places of education (museums, libraries, theatres), places of exercise of power (financial and government institutions), places of entertainment (the Casino at Estoril). They are not chosen at random: they can be seen as traces of civilisation and culture, that is to say, their architecture is an expression of a certain social, political and cultural order. Basically, these photographs are movements that detect order, standards and repetitions, which is another way of describing the rationale that presides over the organisation and consciousness of space, in relation to which, as Benjamin said of Baudelaire, “the pleasure of looking at them celebrates their triumph”.
The subject-matter mediates between the eyes and the various places, trying to detect similarities and differences, which transforms these works into a systematic visual study. This method has echoes of the Becher village and the typological principle that governs his work. Höfer has used them to learn the archaeology of industrial architecture, but her vision has moved away from both Becher's type of structure and architecture itself as an external volume occupying a space. In her initial works we can see the legacy she received, which identifies her as a member, so to speak, of the Düsseldorf school, but her vision has become more specialised: she has left the external aspects and settled on the inside of architecture, inside spatial volumes and dimensions. In the work she has been developing (and the series on Portugal is no exception) her vision is that of one who sees from inside. A choice that can be translated into terms of profundity of vision and the poetic intensity of a certain type of void.
In a letter to Magda von Hattinberg, Rilke wrote:
“You know, I am in pursuit of some remarkable things. I enjoy Einsehen [seeing, understanding]. Thus you will be able to measure with me the miracle of "understanding" a dog as it passes (by that I don't mean being side by side [durchshauen, "seeing through], the simple human gymnastics by which we find ourselves on the other side of the dog, outside it, having used it as a simple window on what is human behind it – no, it's not that) – but rather getting into the dog's world, the nucleus that makes it what it is, in the place where God might have sat down and made the dog, to observe its initial perplexities, its first discoveries, to satisfy himself that the dog had been made properly, that it lacked nothing, that nothing could have been done to make it better. It is possible to stay in the centre of the dog for a moment, provided that you remain alert and jump out of it before its world closes over us, otherwise we would be a dog within a dog, lost to everything else.”
The Einsehen that speaks Rilke is an act of visual comprehension that penetrates to the heart of things. It is not a case of mental gymnastics but a certain form of intuition that transforms itself into knowledge and that "pursuit of something remarkable" is omnipresent in Höfer and is achieved through the precision and rigour of her Standpunkt. On first sight it might appear paradoxical to say that it is a matter of saving the singular when we know it is a work involving a mechanism that arranges things according to certain visual criteria. But that fact is due to the specific character Höfer detects in different places, in which the subject-matter itself (decorative or, as in the case of the libraries and museums, functional) forms part of the spatial narratives and is transformed, as Umberto Eco has said, into eloquent objects. But the typical order and classification of the serial procedure are also characteristic of the collector. Benjamin says:
“The collector's greatest delight is to enclose an individual item in a magic circle in which, as long as it is transfixed by an ultimate chill — that of its acquisition — it remains petrified. Everything that is memory, thought, consciousness, turns into a podium, a moulding, a pedestal, as a result of his ownership.”
In our case, the chill of acquisition becomes the chill of recording, printing, capture in picture form (in her series on zoological gardens the metaphor of the photograph as a symbol of capture, caging and preservation is extended to a very significant limit). For Candida Höfer the subject-matter of the photograph becomes that magic circle that prevents spaces from being precipitated into oblivion. Being in pursuit of the singular, the individual, the particular, finds it redemption in her collection: as Benjamin would say, it is the fate of the particular.
Through the architectonic shapes created by the camera, the different places are transformed as it were into photographic monuments, in the light of which, to return to Benjamin, modernity becomes worthy of transformation into Antiquity: the spaces Höfer photographs are already Ancient even before they are in reality. Ancient is the name we give here to what cannot be forgotten, in the place of the memory and the poetic accumulation and condensation of experiences. That is why architecture too is a kind of abyss: it anticipates and mimics death itself (herein lies the cruelty of those works). Absence, so characteristic of these photographs, is their epitaph in the silence of the tomb, in the coldness of the stone and the concrete of the internal walls, in the immobility of the seats no-one sits on, the tables no-one uses and the books no-one reads. That absence, in the first place, turns our looking into intrusion, but is thereafter seen as the result of systematic attention to the place and unwillingness to turn human beings into elements/subjects of the narrative of the image. Above all, the absence of human beings represents the most extreme concentration on spatiality and its perceptible qualities: a kind of ascetic exercise of the attention.
The other — the spectator and great intruder in Höfer's world — is only possible while that anonymous, invisible and impermanent presence remains. But this disappearance of the elements of private life does not mean that there are no traces of that life: they are there, and they are in the photograph. In spatial terms, the non-visibility of any private use and experience of spaces does not annul it or render it invisible. For that reason, absence becomes a kind of abundance through its capacity to anticipate future events and evoke the filling of space-time. It is inevitable that these spaces will be filled: memory, allied to imagination, is an indomitable spectator that immediately projects what it is to be in those places, what it is to take hold of those books, sit on those chairs and use those tables. An involuntary and silent memory that prevents the transformation of the place of the photograph into a mystical or metaphysical place, or, in other words, a place remote from the experience the body makes of the spaces we live in from day to day.
These are nostalgic but not melancholy pictures, because they do not speak of the disgust and problems that may be experienced in relation to life (melancholy), but rather of the sadness caused by the desire to live in those far-off places (nostalgia). A nostalgia experienced not only by the viewer, but also by the pictures themselves, because, as Benjamin says, "it is not only human beings and animals that have a dwelling-place, but also spirits and especially images”, and the works of Candida Höfer are dwelling-places for spirits and images.
published in the catalog Procurar Portugal, Ed. Centro de Artes Visuais de Coimbra, Coimbra, 2007
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