Michael Wolf: The Transparent City Hardcover – November 1, 2008

I own one of Michael Wolf's pieces and LOVE it so the book was a follow-up for me. Very nicely done.

If you have ever been on a fairly high floor in a downtown high-rise office building, apartment/condo complex, or hotel, and looked out the window at night at the other buildings across the way, you will know first-hand what this book is all about. The only difference between you and German photographer Michael Wolf is that while you were in a nice warm room he was out on rooftops and parking lot top-levels freezing his butt off - he took most of the pictures in Nov-Dec in windy Chicago to get the early darkness. (You can actually see remnants of snow in one or two pictures.)The main images are all fundamentally architectural, taken with a camera with movements or with a lens with movements that give perfect precision to the vertical and horizontal lines. Some images are pure minimalist planes, some show interesting reflections off the glass, some show brightly lit interiors, and some - the most interesting - show people in those brightly lit interiors.If there is any question about the project, it is whether the artist was right to go for this mix or whether he should have concentrated on the last type - the ones with the people - and made a study of building-to-building voyeurism in the big city. I think the latter, but people's opinions will vary.Whichever, he does highlight the voyeuristic theme by including a sampling of highly magnified images of some of the people visible through the windows. I personally don't like this part of series. Having seen Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" I realize that the right way to present the views would have been to give people magnifying glasses and let them find them for themselves. (I am only half joking.)The series is filled with images that capture details of life in the urban sky. I won't try to list them, it's more fun to discover them for yourself. There are, however, two images that must not be missed. One, occurring around the middle of the book, has a wonderful touch - actually two - of self-referentiality. People familiar with photography should have no trouble spotting them.The other, occurring at the end of the book and I hope also the exhibition - in any case you should see it last - shows a view out of the other side of the building, the view not into the city but out of it. If you know Chicago you will instantly recognize it. It is a view of the real world.The book is large format (13.5 x 10.8 in = 34.3 x 27.4 cm) and the images are very sharp and clean. Many spread across two pages and are divided by the gutter, which can be troubling, but it seems a reasonable price to pay for maximum size.The book also contains a brief introduction by Nastasha Egan of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College Chicago (co-publisher of the book along with Aperture) and a thoughtful and entertaining essay by Geoff Manaugh, senior editor of Dwell Magazine.I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys photography, particularly architectural, night, and cityscape photography, as well as to anyone who wants a peek into life in the high-rise world of Chicago and other big cities. Five stars.

The thirty-nine cityscape photos in the book, when you first look at them, might seem sort of dull. Several show only the front of buildings at dusk and others, taken in the late afternoon darkness, show an office environment with people at their desks. Keep looking though and a whole kaleidoscope of shapes and pictures within pictures start to emerge. Wolf, by zooming into buildings and not showing the roof or the street, concentrates on lines of lit windows and the building structure to create a dazzling effect.It all seems visually obvious but I wonder if Chicago has the only core of contemporary office blocks where this type of photo could be taken? I recently reviewed  New York Vertigo  by French photographer Michel Setboun which has some slightly similar night shots of Manhattan but lacks the creative vision that Wolf has displayed in his amazing photos.Remarkable though the work is I was rather disappointed by some of the book's editorial judgment. There are twenty-three (mostly seven by five inches) highly enlarged and therefore very pixilated photos of activity seen through the windows. They fill a little of several spreads leaving the rest of the space blank and to my mind contribute nothing to the overall feel of the building photos. The first twelve pages have seven of them virtually blank except for a few words in display type. The page numbers are laid sideways which means that a short black line has to be used to indicate a six from a nine, many pages have no numbers because the photos extend past the page margins (but don't bleed off the page) all this is just designer whimsy and is no help to the reader.I think it's unfortunate that the publisher's have rather diluted the impact of Wolf's great photos with some amateurish editorial ideas.***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.