Video: Chicago skyscrapers in Michael Wolff's photo project "The Transparent City"
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Chicago, like many other urban centers around the world, has recently been experiencing a period of new structures that form a new layer in the architectural experiments of this city. In early 2007, representatives of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago invited German photographer Michael Wolf to take pictures of the city's skyscrapers. Let's see what came of it.
Chicago is famous for the works of many innovative architects, including David Adler, Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and after the Second World War, this city established itself as the world capital of modern architecture. It is therefore not surprising that most photographers tend to glorify the outstanding architecture of Chicago, but Michael Wolff took a different path. The author presented the city in a more abstract way, without focusing on well-known individual structures.
Called "The Transparent City," the project explores the density and magnitude of Chicago's cityscapes. On the one hand, huge photographs show us skyscrapers in the form of an endless world of the same type of windows. At the same time, each shot gives the viewer the opportunity to look behind many glasses and see what is happening in private apartments and offices.
“I have created images where the viewer's only exit is to jump through one of the windows,” says Michael Wolf, exploring the complex, sometimes blurred, distinctions between private and social life in a densely populated city. "The Transparent City" is a story about people forced to live in structures that resemble bee hives; about people who fall into the trap of a homogeneous space and, despite hundreds and thousands of neighbors, feel lonely.
Michael Wolf was born in Munich in 1954. The author has lived and worked as a photographer in China for ten years, and one of his most recent projects deals with the cultural identity of Hong Kong.
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