360°
2007
The housing blocks of East Berlin were built to be known completely. They were designed on paper, reproduced from standardised drawings, assembled from prefabricated panels, and distributed across the city in configurations that varied as little as possible from one site to the next. The Plattenbau, as this type of construction is known, was the built form of a specific political conviction: that human domestic needs were uniform, that housing could be industrialised, that the plan was sufficient to produce the place.
To know the plan was to know the building. To know one building was to know all of them. That was the logic.
360° starts from a different premise. For each image in this series I photographed the same building from its four cardinal points and combined the results into a single layered photograph. The aim was not to produce a documentary record of what the building looks like from any particular direction. It was to ask what happens when you attempt to synthesise multiple photographic views of the same object into something that contains them all simultaneously.
What happens is this: the building becomes unrecognisable.
The composite image is not a building you could navigate. It is not a building you could construct or reproduce from drawings. The four views that should, in theory, describe the structure completely have instead produced something that corresponds to no real position in space, a building as it might exist in memory or dream, familiar in its components and illegible as a whole. The most documented, most standardised, most reproducible architecture of the twentieth century becomes, through this method, completely singular. Each composite image is unrepeatable. No two buildings produce the same result even when the buildings are, in every measurable sense, identical.
This seems to me the correct response to this particular architecture. The Plattenbau was built on the premise that a building could be fully known through its documentation. Bernd and Hilla Becher spent decades photographing industrial structures to show that systematic documentation reveals differences invisible to the casual eye. I was interested in the opposite question: what does systematic documentation fail to reveal? What does the building contain that the photograph, even four photographs, cannot reach?
The answer the composite images give is not a fact about these buildings specifically. It is a fact about photographic knowledge in general. We tend to treat the photograph as a form of access, a way of knowing a place we have not visited or cannot enter. What these images suggest is that photographic access is a particular kind of limitation masquerading as adequacy. Four views of a building from the outside tell you what its surfaces look like from four directions. They tell you nothing about what it is like to live inside, what the stairwells smell like in winter, what happens to light in the corridor at four in the afternoon, what the walls absorb over decades of habitation.
The buildings I photographed were built in a city that was, for forty years, one of the most thoroughly documented places on earth. The state apparatus recorded, filed, and surveilled with an ambition that has few historical parallels. And the city remained, as cities always do, larger than its archive. The people who lived in these blocks knew things about them that no photograph contained and no file recorded.
The composite images are not trying to recover that knowledge. They are simply marking its absence, making visible the gap between what photography can hold and what a building actually is. The strangeness of the resulting images is not a failure of the method. It is the method working correctly, producing an image that is honest about what it cannot show by showing, instead, what the attempt to show everything actually looks like.
It looks like this: familiar and unnavigable, documented and unknown, seen from all sides and visible from none.
