The photography in the exhibitin Mies in Berlin spans nearly a century. On one end of the spectrum, archival prints from large- format glass negatives as early as 1907 document Ludwig Mies van der Rohe‘s earliest work; on the other, recent, digitally altered images by Thomas Ruff subject those iconic images to postmodern mani- pulation. Yet in Mies in Berlin photography is annexed to architecture, so that even in it‘s dramatically different manifestations, it is organized and brought into focus by individual buildings. Between the two extremes represented by vintage archival prints and digital manipu- lations in Mies in Berlin are a series of new photographs of Mies‘s German-period buildings by the contemporary german photographer Kay Fingerle.
Although many of the images are striking examples of their genre, one series of Fingerle‘s photographs has an especially lyric presence.
Among the buildings shot for the MoMA show, she has photographed Mies`s German Pavillion ́at Barcelona, a building known only through photographs for more than fifty years … Fingerle confronted the daunting challen- ge of rephotographing this building, which owes its very existence to the power of photography. Her images naturally depict aspects of the pavilion not represented in the original photos, illustrating changes in our understanding of architecture over nearly seventy-five years. Claire Zimmermann in MoMA Magazine June 2001
Villa Tugendhat I architect Mies van der Rohe I color photograph 150 x 100 cm I @ Kay Fingerle I Exhibition Architecture Biennale Venice
mies. I series of 42 color and black and white photographs I 60*40 cm I 2001 courtesy of Museum of modern Art New York
Miesian Views
The photographs exhibited in In Praise of Shadows play with our collective visual conscience. Suchimages awaken in us the memory of a particular atmosphere. It lies in its nature – as the gaseous shell of the earth – that it is fleeting, and precisely this ungraspable auratic shell gives these images their charme and originality, so that they function as key images. Contemoraneous photographs of buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, even more so than the buildings themselves, are part of our collective visual conscience. Mies ́s architecure is some of the most frequently documented, and it ́s trigger images, which we associate vaguely with his time, its architecture and its style, are correspondingly widespread. Architects, and photographer as well, refer to these trigger images. ́Mesian Views ́ , which is not ilimited to the photographs of Mies ́s buidlings, plays with our collective memory , with our preconceived ́miesian knowledge`that is tickled by the challenge these images present.
Nanni Baltzer in Trajectories Catalogue of the 9th Biennale Marsilio 2006
Villa Tugendhat I architect Mies van der Rohe I color photograph 150 x 60 cm I @ Kay Fingerle I Exhibition at Goethe Institute New York
Barcelona Pavillion I architect Mies van der Rohe I color photograph 200 x 60 cm I @ Kay Fingerle I Exhibition at Goethe Institute New York
Barcelona Pavillion I architect Mies van der Rohe I color photograph 200 x 60 cm I @ Kay Fingerle I Exhibition at Goethe Institute New York