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Architecture and photography: beach types
Amir Zaki's pictures, on show in New York until 25 June, provide food for thought on the subject of architectural photography, its meaning and the new creative developments of this tool.
"Relics", a selection of works by LA-based photographer and artist Amir Zaki now on display at Perry Rubinstein Gallery in New York, is an exhibition that engenders doubt. Doubt, first of all, as to the nature of the medium (photography? Computer-generated imagery? A combination of the two?); doubt as to the verisimilitude of the subjects depicted; doubt as to which of several possible interpretations of the title might be the most accurate.
The subjects of Zaki's photographs – granted that images so heavily manipulated can still be defined as photography – are a series of lifeguard cabins that populate the beaches of Southern California's coast. Photographed from a low angle and thus severed from their recreational contexts, the structures strike heroic poses that belie their humble purpose and recast them as the relics of a distant Ballardian future – an effect accentuated by the insertion of dramatic backgrounds culled from a library of skies previously photographed by Zaki. Further manipulation, including the removal of certain structural elements and points of access such as ladders and stairways, imbues them with with a mysterious and vaguely improbable appearance. What masquerades as architectural photography, in other words, is anything but: the images are the result of a design process in themselves, perfectly plausible works of fiction created through the selective deletion of reality – a strategy previously employed by Zaki in his manipulated photographs of Neutra houses (featured on the cover of Domus 885 in October 2005). Zaki is careful to categorise the work as portraiture rather than typology, casting it in an interpretative rather than documentary light. Yet – as in the Neutra photographs – the strength of Zaki's work is less in the unquestionable beauty of the architectural artefacts represented than in the process of selective erasure through which, in his images, photography comes to acquire some of the qualities of sculpture. As a consequence, it is the subtler, more understated and more plausible of these portraits, those that hover on the border between reality and fiction, that are the most compelling, and that set Zaki apart from other artists – such as Filip Dujardin – who utilise photographic manipulation in a more transparent, spectacularised manner. Joseph Grima
