Thursday, 16 May 2013

pages







I saw the above yesterday morning, while I was getting ready for work, between half six and seven, so, here it is. For whatever reason it made me want to put these below, below.













































The text above is:


Everything ends up being the size of a photograph. In this impossible relationship between the real and its representation, between truth and falsehood, between the whole and the part, everything ultimately fits into a small space. A photograph is big enough to hold a whole city, a skyscraper, even the world. The size of things may be paradoxical, this is something we discover as children, when we begin to study geography and are faced with maps of the world. Something similar happens with architectural plans. Everything fits in a photograph, just as almost all feelings fit into a single word. Which is never the same one. |Why not, if all words fit into a dictionary? To what extent are artists who focus on the construction process actually interested in the results? Here, architecture is an excuse, a pretext for addressing relationships between the individual and space. Architecture has developed a version, which is voracious, devouring the individual, ignoring the city. This is why photography is essential for its survival. Photography rescues the building from death and, moreover, it removes it from decadence because it takes it over to the other side in which things are no longer things but their perfect representations. On paper, in a book, in a letter, all stories are eternal. In real life they are sadly brief, decadent and vulgar, we see how art photography substitutes reality [a constructed reality] now we know buildings, cities and places that we have never visited and in which we will never be through photography. But more than this unquestionable reality is the fact that photography increases our capacity to understand space, its functions, and its relations to our reality, to the person who inhabits it, looks at it or justifies it. Construction is ever higher, ever larger, ever faster, with new and intelligent materials. Perhaps now no one builds forever so that future ruins may be beautiful (as Albert Speer advised [perhaps we see no future]) perhaps now one only builds in order to take photographs. Maybe everything fits into the size of a photograph. Paul Valery said said so long ago: “infinity, my dear, is something very small; it is a matter of writing, the universe only exists on paper.” The grandiosity of architecture, the energy of new technologies, the pride of the architect and the pretentiousness of the builder, my dears, are very small things: it is a matter of image, architecture only exists in a photograph,


The size of a photograph, Rosa Olivares, EXIT magazine.



Really feeling the Sisyphean push and pull tonight....





No comments:

Post a Comment