Reinhart Wolf: New York. I grew up in a bookish house, and cannot remember ever having gotten a present from my father other than a book. In most rooms of the house we were surrounded by shelves filled up with volumes of all sorts. But one book did not fit in: Reinhart Wolf: New York. It was always in the way somehow. I remember looking at this book while lying flat on the floor, because this is the only way a child could handle its oversized format of about half a meter width and one meter height.
Even though I haven’t opened this book since thirty years, the series of large-scale photos of New York skyscrapers is still clearly in my memory. The photographer has limited his view to the top ends of the famous skyscrapers only. Whereas these buildings are usually seen in a dramatic perspective from street level, they now appear in frontal elevation and quite unforgivingly show details that cannot be seen from the ground. The pictures are thus like revealing portraits of well-known people. Through this perspective one can imagine the immense sizes of the caps of these skyscrapers, which is emphasized by the contrast to the screws, and nuts, and folds, and all the details that become visible in Wolf’s photos. The backgrounds of these most urban buildings is always the sky, no other building, no landscape, only the weather, and its ever changing atmospheres, lights and reflections on the built surfaces.
While in the 1970s, when Wolf took the pictures, New York decayed on the ground, the photographer only focussed on the sky. In the urban crisis of that time, it was quite an escape to look at architecture only as an object, and not as an environment.Reinhart Wolf: New York. I grew up in a bookish house, and cannot remember ever having gotten a present from my father other than a book. In most rooms of the house we were surrounded by shelves filled up with volumes of all sorts. But one book did not fit in: Reinhart Wolf: New York. It was always in the way somehow. I remember looking at this book while lying flat on the floor, because this is the only way a child could handle its oversized format of about half a meter width and one meter height.
Even though I haven’t opened this book since thirty years, the series of large-scale photos of New York skyscrapers is still clearly in my memory. The photographer has limited his view to the top ends of the famous skyscrapers only. Whereas these buildings are usually seen in a dramatic perspective from street level, they now appear in frontal elevation and quite unforgivingly show details that cannot be seen from the ground. The pictures are thus like revealing portraits of well-known people. Through this perspective one can imagine the immense sizes of the caps of these skyscrapers, which is emphasized by the contrast to the screws, and nuts, and folds, and all the details that become visible in Wolf’s photos. The backgrounds of these most urban buildings is always the sky, no other building, no landscape, only the weather, and its ever changing atmospheres, lights and reflections on the built surfaces.
While in the 1970s, when Wolf took the pictures, New York decayed on the ground, the photographer only focussed on the sky. In the urban crisis of that time, it was quite an escape to look at architecture only as an object, and not as an environment.