Transparent City
Chicago, like many urban centers throughout the world, has recently undergone a surge in new construction, grafting a new layer of architectural experimentation onto those of past eras. In early 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, with the support of U.S. Equities Realty, invited Michael Wolf as an artist-in-residence to document this phenomenon. Bringing his unique perspective on changing urban environments to a city renowned for its architectural legacy, Wolf chose to photograph the central downtown area, focusing specifically on issues of voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux. This was Wolf's first body of work to address an American city. Whereas prior series have juxtaposed humanizing details within the surrounding geometry of the urban landscape, in The Transparent City, his details are fragments of life–digitally distorted and hyper-enlarged–snatched surreptitiously via telephoto lenses. ‘The ground is nowhere in sight in Wolf’s dramatically geometric, nearly abstract photographs of Chicago’s Loop towers. Shot from strategically selected rooftops and perfectly printed in an aptly large, vertical book, Wolf’s subtly modulated color photographs are monumental studies in grays, whites, blacks, golds, and occasional splashes of green and blue. Given their elegant grids, nuanced variations, and stillness, these images echo the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin, yet this is the real world, and real people inhabit these immense cellular buildings, these boxy hives, these human filing cabinets, and Wolf’s stealthy, intrusive lens finds them, most often alone contemplating a television or computer. The lighting is exquisitely moody, each lit interior is a screen or stage, each human figure as poignant as those in the paintings of Edward Hopper, an artist Wolf, acclaimed for his earlier books on China, cites as an influence. With intimations of surveillance and vulnerability, these intensely beautiful cityscapes seem austere and inhuman until one lands on a magnified picture of a man giving the distant photographer the finger.’ – Donna Seaman
