{"id":24690,"date":"2014-07-25T14:01:56","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T12:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/una-porta-lasciata-socchiusa-la-fotografia-di-luisa-lambri-2\/"},"modified":"2016-03-08T19:16:17","modified_gmt":"2016-03-08T18:16:17","slug":"una-porta-lasciata-socchiusa-la-fotografia-di-luisa-lambri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/una-porta-lasciata-socchiusa-la-fotografia-di-luisa-lambri\/","title":{"rendered":"Una porta lasciata socchiusa: la fotografia di Luisa Lambri"},"content":{"rendered":"

Untitled (Sheats-Goldstein House, #14), 2007.\u00a0 All photos courtesy of Studio Guenzani, Milano; Thomas Dane, London; Luhring Augustine, New York; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles; Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo; Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo<\/em><\/p>\n

A Door Left Ajar: the Photography of Luisa Lambri<\/p>\n

Looking at photographs by Luisa Lambri makes one forget their subject even if they are easy to recognize. Few of her images leave one guessing. And though they were all taken in buildings, few of them fix attention on their subject. This is a paradox, for architecture has been the ostensible subject of Lambri\u2019s photography for well over a decade, occasionally filtered through glass and condensation, sculpted by light, or tinged with color. She chooses her angles deliberately, preferring the diagonal, a hinged door, a cupboard left ajar, or a corridor in steep recession. Angles deeply affect our perception and reflections heighten our sense of visual escape from confining planes. Lambri\u2019s angles always suggest volleys of the eye\u2014sometimes in reflexes, sometimes in daring leaps beyond the frame. Only rarely will she face something head-on, and when she does, the gaze is at once trapped in filters and meshes. Most often, though, her views imply a turning of the head, a view into a depth we barely fathom.<\/p>\n

\"Untitled<\/a>
Untitled (Gifu Apartments), 2000<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The surfaces that enclose interior spaces vary from dark to light, from dull to shiny, as they attract or deflect attention. Light and shade mix with unstable hues along a corridor, splash puddles on dark floors, or brighten as we look through windows. Lambri\u2019s photographs possess a real surface, laboriously enhanced by digital editing, and ever resisting a facile illusion of depth. Since the printed surface is always imbued with color, it acquires a density of its own and shields against the distractions of perspective. Thus reinforced, Lambri\u2019s images resist the pull of her preferred diagonal and affirm their flatness.
\nLambri has photographed a series of canonic twentieth-century houses without ever revealing them in instantly recognizable images. Her approach to places long familiar to anyone interested in architecture require un-learning and deliberate avoidance of precisely those features that made certain buildings hallmarks of their kind. It takes thought and discipline to gain a point of view that undercuts clich\u00e9s and restores freshness to the moment of recognition. Lambri\u2019s vantage points never play merely clever riffs on the familiar. Her choice is always premeditated so as to reveal something one might never have detected without her. I had this experience myself a few years ago, when I saw her photographs of a building I have been studying for years. Sure to recognize any detail, I was momentarily taken aback by a photograph of Giuseppe Terragni\u2019s Casa del Fascio in Como. In a picture of the second-floor corridor I suddenly recognized a spectral reflection of the building\u2019s light-filled atrium suspended in the black marble slabs that line a bay of the upstairs landing: here, all of a sudden, an image of the building hovered at an incalculable distance on one of its own dark walls, as if it were a quasi-tomographic \u201cother.\u201d I have never seen anything like it before or since, and must credit Lambri with nothing short of discovery, for that is what her photograph reveals: something unseen and unimagined, yet plain to the eye, a ghost of the building nested in its own reflection.
\nLess dramatic, but equally telling are her pictures of interiors that somehow capture the passage of their occupants even when nothing has been left behind. Lambri does not track down traces of events [fixing a kind of forensic record], but rather leaves the viewer guessing about changes that reveal no cause and no aim. The cupboards of the De Menil House in Houston convey an impression of their emptiness even when closed, and when some of the doors are lightly ajar, a palpable sense of vacuity overwhelms their solid surface. Similarly, a series of photographs of the building\u2019s walled garden during a rainstorm contains the fury of the elements and registers humidity as if trapped in an Erlenmeyer flask. Observed in all its intemperate effects, the weather remains outside of the house, whose comfortable theater affords a view on a stage under a raging storm. To achieve images that possess these capacities Lambri needs to \u201cedit\u201d them in the laboratory. Her prints bear the mark of transformations that go well beyond the removal of blemishes and adjustments of color and tone: they reach their status as pictures only through processes that develop \u201cinside\u201d themselves like chameleons that do not adopt the colors of their surroundings but rather add their own to create patterns of which they are only a fragment.
\nLuisa Lambri\u2019s photography opens up, just slightly, the door to an inside of the image that hides rather than exposes its subject. Endlessly fascinating because it eludes our grasp, architecture leads a sleepwalking life in her images and will continue to haunt our memory of places whether they are familiar or unknown. When she blended the Asilo Sant\u2019Elia kindergarten she frequented as a child in Como with the Casa del Fascio in a video of 2000, Lambri merged a personal recollection of place with the ghostly image of a white elephant in twentieth-century architecture. Perhaps none of her photographs demonstrates the double-sided nature of a flat picture plane\u2014inflected by memory, but arrested in the present\u2014better than a series made in Kazuyo Sejima\u2019s Gifu Apartments, in which internal wooden shutters mounted on pivots alternately occlude the light or allow it to filter into rooms in brilliant bands of brightness. Whether horizontal blinds fold the light or vertical shutters close it out, the picture surface itself begins to \u201cbreak\u201d as it is consumed by luminosity. It is in such images that Lambri makes her photography synonymous with itself.<\/p>\n