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Recently his work has taken a new turn, and he has become interested in other people’s models. In Model Studies, Demand has photographed discarded structures made by famous architects such as John Lautner.

Demand considers the architectural model a sculptural manifestation of ideas, addressing the fleeting nature of concepts that are bound up in the repetitive creative process of conceiving and discarding new frameworks. Model Studies, he believes, explores the numerous possibilities embedded in the concept of the model.

For the third part of his series, Demand considers the ideas of Austrian architect Hans Hollein. BJP caught up with him to find out more.

BJP: Who, or what, are your main inspirations?
Thomas Demand: The world in front of me…

BJP: When did sculpture and photography first merge in your practice?
TD: Photography was just a record in the beginning, but then complicated the effort, as the image of something isn’t necessarily a recognisable rendering of the object it shows. This is a common place, but as a student it’s nevertheless a nut to crack.

BJP: How did Model Studies start and what made you want to carry it on?
TD: I was invited to come as a research scholar to the Getty Institute, and by browsing through their holdings I came across a small number of discarded models by the architect John Lautner, all of unbuilt projects. I saw a certain potential, dormant in these fragile leftovers, and tried to find out more about that in a book and subsequently a series of photographs.

BJP: What was it like going through the collection at Getty? In what ways were you surprised or inspired by what you found?
TD: These models are too fragile to be shown and they were never made to be used outside of their office. So it’s a testimony to finding and refining an idea for a building project rather than a representational selling tool, which architectural models usually tend to be. That and their decay, the traces of their changing appearance, and careless handling also resulted in an appearance I don’t feature in my own work, which I welcomed. They are nearly all made from cardboard but do not do what my previous work did.

BJP: You first came across John Lautner’s models, did you actively seek out Hans Hollein’s work? If so, why?
TD: I met Hans Hollein a few times and his freedom in thinking much impressed me at the time. Years later I had heard that his office and estate had to be split apart and transferred to an institution, so I thought I would like to see his stuff before it got decontextualised. I went to see the five places where the archive was stored and took a camera.

BJP: Why is it important to show the ripped edges, pencil marks, and human work that has gone into the models?
TD: There is not much point in finding my own work in others’. It’s a different temporality than my previous work. It’s not about a utopy, memory or an idealistic view of the world but much like the leftover of an idea or a formal process.

BJP: Have you always had an interest in architecture? If so, why?
TD: Small question, big answer: man is transforming his environment, we create artificial circumstances for a number of reasons, like shelter, all that is architecture. And as Mr. Hollein said somewhere, architecture is a medium of communication.

www.thomasdemand.info Model Studies III will be on show for the first time as part of ARCHIVMATERIAL / NEW STOP MOTION at Sprüth Magers Berlin from 24 Nov 2018 – 19 January 2019 https://spruethmagers.com/

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He’s now been adding images to his Midnight Modern project for five years, capturing still-futuristic buildings with long exposures in the silvery, pleasingly alien light of the moon. Midnight Modern IV is his final addition to the series and sees him shooting outside Palm Springs for the first time, and also stretching the Mid-Century time-frame to include contemporary architecture such as the 2014 Black Desert House by Oller & Pejic.

Midnight Modern includes many famous architectural landmarks, including prefabricated houses such as the Futuro House shown above – one of 100 fibreglass homes made by Matti Suuronen in the 1960s and 70s. And in fact though Blachford was inspired by architectural icons, and by images which helped cement their reputation by photographers such as Julius Schulman and Slim Aarons, he was also interested in mass-built tract homes – the so-called ‘cookie-cutter’ houses built on large estates by organisations the Alexander Construction Company.

“I also love the execution of the tract home developments that have stood the test of time so well,” he told Architectural Digest. “In the era of McMansions it is so refreshing to see mass housing done well.”

https://tomblachford.com Midnight Modern by Tom Blachford is on show until 04 November at TOTH Gallery, 195 Chrystie Street, New York NY 1002 https://tothgallery.com

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Born in Chicago in 1915, Stoller grew up in New York and studied architecture at NYU, getting into photography while still a student. Launching his career in the late 1930s, he worked with Paul Strand in the Office of Emergency Management from 1940-41 and, post-war, was perfectly poised to take advantage of the American economic boom. Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, Eero Saarinen and Marcel Breuer – he shot work by them all, including iconic buildings such as The Guggenheim Museum, Kennedy International Airport, and the Fallingwater house.

But if he made it look easy, it didn’t happen by accident. Shooting with large or medium format cameras, Stoller often spent days at locations before taking any photographs, taking account of the sun, the shadows, and the architectural lines he saw – while always keeping an eye out for the serendipitous.

“With 8×10, what you do is, you go on a job and you may wander around and look at the job for two days — certainly for a day; you never shoot the first day,” he said in the same interview, available via the American Society of Media Photographers. “I know what the sun does at different times of the year. I studied descriptive geometry, shades and shadows and rendering at architectural school, and I know what the sun will do, what the shadows will be like.

“So I go around with a plan of the job that I’ve made, and I’ll put arrows and times on those,” added Stoller, who died in 2004. “Then, when I get back, I’ll make a schedule with times and what shot gets done at that time. Then I just go and shoot — always keeping an antenna up for the unusual shot; it’s not as cut and dried as all that. Very often, the very best pictures are the ones that you suddenly see out of the corner of your eye.”

Now The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography is presenting a large exhibition of his work, the first time it’s gone on show in Russia. Spanning from the late 1930s to the 70s, the retrospective is open from 20 September-02 December at the Center’s Red October space in central Moscow.

Pioneers of American Modernism is on show from 20 September-02 December at Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, Moscow www.lumiere.ru

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Noel Bowler provides a possible answer in his series Union, which is on show at Impressions Gallery from 04 July – 22 September. Taking us inside the meeting rooms and head offices of industrial unions, it introduces us to the people who try to safeguard labour rights.

Bowler portrays union offices in fourteen countries, ranging from Washington to Warsaw to his native Ireland. He invites us to consider office spaces, meeting rooms and boardrooms as empty, dormant chambers, heavy with a sense of suspended conversation. In doing so, he gives us the chance to consider how these beleaguered organisations – which date back to the nineteenth century – are adapting to today’s challenges.

Economists now openly talk about a third industrial age, an era of self-employment, flexible employee arrangements, and zero-hour contracts. Traditional work practices, they say, are just that – old-fashioned, a thing of the past. The rooms Bowler photographs are quiet, and yet their set ups suggest important summits and dramatic negotiations.

“Even the furniture seems dramatic and overthought,” Bowler tells BJP, “perhaps burdened under the weight of its own responsibilities.”

Bowler is fascinated by what we can learn from the built environment – Making Space, his first major series, portrayed rooms used for prayer by Muslim communities in his native Ireland. “I think viewer engagement is vital to the narrative,” Bowler says. “For me, allowing the viewer to populate the images within their own imagination is not only one of the strengths of this type of work, but of photography as a whole.”

Many of these rooms were chanced upon rather than sought out, a factor which gives Union a sense of authenticity. “I always take the rooms as I find them,” Bowler says. “As a rule I don’t rearrange or change anything within the frame.

“Where possible, I would spend up to an hour in each room on my own, just absorbing my thoughts and research and allowing instinct to decide the frame. For me, this process allows for those serendipitous moments to occur.”

One such moment is the image taken at the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisations) building in Washington DC, America’s capital, and the heart of its federal government. “This was the office of the person assigned to escort me around the building. A room, otherwise I would never have seen,” Bowler says.

This five year project allowed Bowler to explore organisations as varied as the United Steelworkers of America and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and alongside these interior shots, Bowler took portraits of union leaders. One of his portraits shows Bob Crow, for example, General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers in the UK from 2002 until his death in 2014 from a heart attack, just weeks after organising major industrial action across London’s transport networks.

There’s a sense of a palimpsest here; the distinct character of the unions communicated through the details that lie embedded in the many rooms, offering clues as to the attitudes and beliefs of those who inhabit them. A poster on one worker’s messy desk reads ‘Vote Socialism’, positioned next a photo of Karl Marx making the victory sign. In contrast, a meeting room, minimalistic and modern, portrays a Rene Gruau poster – more socialite than socialist.

“I feel we live in a neo-liberal society with the cult of the individual at the forefront, satisfied to let corporate power run things in the background,” Bowler says. “There seems to have been a shift in ideology, which basically promotes corporate individuality as good and collective non-corporate action as bad. So long as this ideology exists, I think unions will battle to find their position within it.

“That sense of ‘the battle still to come’ is very much present whether it’s to organise and reassure the labour market as a whole or to simply reaffirm its own position as a mechanism that’s still relevant.”

www.noelbowler.com Union by Noel Bowler is on show from 04 July – 22 September at Impressions Gallery, 7 Aldermanbury, Centenary Square, Bradford, BD1 1SD www.impressions-gallery.com Union by Noel Bowler is published by Kehrer, priced €48; the book includes an introduction by Ken Grant www.kehrerverlag.com

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Born in Reutlingen, Germany in 1967, Danner studied photography at Fachhochschule Bielefeld in Germany and the University of Brighton in the UK, and lived in London from 1997 to 2000. He’s now based in Berlin, where he lectures in photography at the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule. He has previously published three monographs and seven artist’s books.

His project “examines the new ways in which migrants are pursuing their hope for a better life”, he states, adding: “The term ‘avant-garde’ stands for progress and the way of a pioneer. Driven by the desire to give their lives meaning, and guided by their own integrity, migrants bring new perspectives and points of view to our society. The origin of his work was the reading of a 1943 text by the philosopher Hannah Arendt.”

In his project, Danner shows “first and foremost” the people who migrate from their homes, but also “those that influence, prevent, channel, or impact a migrant’s humanity”, including border police and those working for the state. In addition to these portraits, his project includes quotes from Arendt, archive images of refugees and satellite imagery from crisis regions. “These depict an even wider spectrum of actors,” he states, “which are interlaced to create a complete system”.

The second prize in the Dummy Award went to Karim El Maktafi for his project Hayati [which means ‘my life’ in Arabic]. Shot entirely on a smart phone, the project reflects on El Maktafi’s identity as a second-generation immigrant, born in Italy to Moroccan parents. “Growing up between two worlds forced me to sharpen my gaze and to compare these perspectives which often diverge from each other,” says El Maktafi, who was born in 1992, graduated from the Italian Institute of Photography in Milan in 2013, and was awarded a year-long scholarship at Fabrica in early 2016.

“Embracing a single identity is not easy; feeling out of place or like an odd cultural hybrid often happens. Yet, while trying to define this identity, one understands the privilege of standing on a doorstep’ at the edge of two environments. One can decide who to be, where to belong, or to create new ties, while keeping alive the experiences learnt along the path.”

Third prize went to Filippo Romano for the dummy Water Tanks in Mathare Slum, shot in a community in Nairobi, Kenya he’s been visiting since 2011. Born in 1968, Romano studied at the International Center of Photography in New York, and shoots both architecture and documentary photography. He has exhibited his work in venues such as the Canadian Center for Architecture CCA and Sao Paulo Art Museum, and published in architectural books and magazines.

Founded in 2010, the Fotobookfestival Kassel Dummy Award is a prestigious part of the festival programme, judged by an international jury which this year included publishers Valentina Abenavoli (Akina Books) and Pierre Bessard (Editions Bessard), photographers JH Engström, Susan Meiselas, and Dana Lixenberg, and editor Salvatore Vitale (YET Magazine).

The three winners were selected from a long-list of 53 book dummies, all of which were on show at the Fotobookfestival Kassel, which ran from 31 May-03 June. The dummies will now go on show at festivals such as the Hamburg Triennial of Photography from 07-17 June, Organ Vida – International Photography Festival, Zagreb from 10-16 September, and Tokyo Art Book Fair in spring 2019.

2018.fotobookfestival.org/kassel-dummy-award-2018

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But by 2013 Southwark Council, which owned the estate, had moved out the estate’s tenants and leaseholders, and sold the land to property developer Lendlease. As the estate depopulated, “guerrilla gardeners, graffiti artists, skateboarders and parkour enthusiasts, as well as photographers, film-makers, and other assorted ruin-tourists” moved in, says Coleman; he adds that, of the 406 trees on the estate in 2013, at least 283 have been felled to make way for building work.

All of the Heygate buildings have now been demolished, and the new ‘Elephant Park’ development is due to be completed by 2025. The new owner, Lendlease, have promised to replace the lost trees and more, but only a small percentage of the former residents have been able to return: Southwark Council’s planning policy requires a minimum of 35% affordable housing for new developments such as this, but Lendlease successfully lobbied to make it 25% instead.

https://cargocollective.com/matbcoleman Heygate: A Natural History by Matthew Benjamin Coleman is on show until 24 September at PARCspace, UAL Photography and the Archive Research Centre, London College of Communication, London SE1 6SB. The exhibition is open from 11.00–16.00 on Mondays and Tuesdays and at other times by appointment via Robin Christian at r.christian@lcc.arts.ac.uk  www.photographyresearchcentre.co.uk

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The roster includes owls, dinosaurs, coffee-pots, and even a Mexican giant standing on a roof serving nachos and beer. At the time, the architectural establishment dismissed these structures as “monstrosities”, but they flourished nevertheless, and now they’re even celebrated.

California Crazy: American Pop Architecture is a collection of images of some of the best, compiled by Taschen’s executive editor Jim Heimann. The book also includes David Gebhard’s definitive essay, Roadside Vernacular Architecture, and traces the influences and attitudes that fostered the movement.

California Crazy. American Pop Architecture by Jim Heimann is published by Taschen, priced £40 www.taschen.com

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