I n t h e M i n d ’ s E y e 

b a r b a r a r o s e

José Manuel Ballester is a Madrid-based artist who is fast becoming
known as one of the most original and impressive photographers in the
world. His is the generation that definitively transformed photography
from a minor to a major art, a shift reflected in the works of Andreas
Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer and Jeff Wall, among others.
Their large-scale photographs, made possible by digital technology and
mounted on solid supports, have in many ways and for many collectors
replaced the pleasures that painting once delivered.
Although he began as a painter and printmaker—two activities he
continues to pursue along with the photography for which he is best
known—Ballester graduated the University of Madrid with a degree in
fine arts not as a painter, sculptor or photographer but as a restorer of
Flemish and Italian old masters; he had wished to learn concrete
techniques. This commitment to a deep understanding of technique is
characteristic of his methodical, intellectual approach. His training as a
concert pianist, as well as the fact that his father is a music professor,
undoubtedly contributes to his discipline and rigour. The metronome
in his studio is a constant reminder of time passing in a measured way.
Despite his background in restoration, Ballester’s billboard-sized
images place him firmly in the context of modern, supersized digital
imagery. However, he is not only a practitioner of the “big photograph”
that has superseded the mural-sized New York School “big picture.”
He is also a painter and printmaker and, when the occasion demands it,
a video installation artist.
Whatever his chosen medium, Ballester’s vision is inevitably
informed by his experience as a painter. Every photographer, from
the humblest snapshot taker to the most informed professional, “sees”
the world and records what is seen. The greatest photographers, however,
are not simply visual journalists. They have a transformative vision
of the world and what it contains that illuminates and transforms
consciousness, altering not only how we see reality, but also what it may
mean on levels other than the visible surface. They are not reporters,
but visionaries.
José Manuel Ballester’s vision is both poetic and metaphoric; one
might even argue ekphrastic. His photographs of abandoned buildings,
some decaying and heavy with the traces of those who have been there
but are now gone, some just being built and not yet inhabited, their
functions still being defined, imply obscured narratives. Whereas the
buildings and streets in his cityscape photographs often contain
figures, the interiors and exteriors of the huge, towering buildings and
skylines he photographs are always empty, still waiting to be filled.
They resonate with enigma.
The most critical questions these technological/architectural miracles
pose—for Ballester’s images are nearly always of new spaces, often as
they are still being constructed—are what these spaces are to be filled
with, and for what purpose, and by whom. Such queries may seem
irrelevant in relation to the kind of public structures Ballester chooses
to photograph. However, they are the heart of the content of his images,
which raise unsettling questions rather than simply document a disquieting
reality.
Buildings are static, but their uses are constantly in question. Thus an
historic church becomes a chic Madrid restaurant called La Capilla; Les
Halles, once called the stomach of Paris, is now a labyrinth of cheap
commercial shopping malls. A pawnshop in a Romanesque building
once used as a studio by Jasper Johns becomes a discothèque named
The Bank. The first cast-iron skyscrapers built for light manufacture are
zoned as artists’ studios whose generous spaces end up as the refuge of
the rich and famous and the boutiques, beauty spas and restaurants that
serve them.
This sudden mutability is a characteristic of the transformative
mobility of contemporary life, and this knowledge of functional transformation
informs Ballester’s images. We know the mega-skyscrapers
he photographs are useful, indeed crucial, to a mass society and a
global economy, but we also know they can crumble, burn or become
missile targets.
Ballester’s skyscrapers, airports, elevator shafts and other technological
wonders are more imposing than they are friendly, more
anonymous and cold than they are intimate and welcoming. Like
Vatican City, they are symbols of power as much as of wealth.
Like Michelangelo’s great Roman church, these structures are not
isolated buildings; they are part of an entire urban structure. Indeed,
one may consider the futuristic city (as much as its architecture) to
be Ballester’s subject. Silent and devoid of human presence, these
immense, empty spaces stand as metaphors for the emptiness and
tabula rasa that is the unknown future of their function.
Ballester prepares his projects for many years before realizing them.
Given the specificity of his choices of where to roam—Broadway and
Times Square in New York and the not-yet-finished streets and highways
of the new Chinese city of Chenzen—we can hardly consider him
a flâneur. He does not know exactly what he will photograph until he
sees it, but he is very conscious of why he wants to work at a specific site
that is charged with political and social meaning.
Ballester’s recent large-scale photographs are digital images altered
through computer manipulation. They do not reproduce the space as it
is but rather interpret it in terms of spatial volumes accentuated
through digital enhancement, distending or deepening space to a
degree never before possible. Thus they create a new kind of space for
photography, a space that is closer to the illusory perspective projections
of old master paintings than they are to “straight” photography.
Ballester’s photographs of public spaces and cityscapes are not, in that
sense, any more “realistic” than Madame Bovary is as a sociological
study of provincial life in 19th-century France.
Among the properties of photography that Ballester uses to great
effect is that of enlargement. The scale of his oversize formats is not
arbitrary: it serves to impress the viewer with the inhumanity of the
scale of contemporary architecture which, like that of ancient Rome
and of the ideal cities Rudolph Speer intended to build for the Third
Reich, dominates the individual, who necessarily becomes part of a
crowd in such iconic spaces. In his recent photographs, including the
Broadway series, he enlarges details digitally until they become brilliantly
coloured blurs, their original source unrecognizable. With the
extended artificial palette digitization provides, Ballester emphasizes
the unnaturalness and brilliance of the mechanically mixed hues
brightened by the computer screens where they are born.
Although architecture remains Ballester’s principal subject, his
recent work, including studies of his obsessively ordered library
enlarged to the degree that books become unrecognizable rectangles of
brilliant colour, abstraction is a secondary theme that is becoming
increasingly important to him. With the breadth of his knowledge of
the history of photography as well as of its technological potential
for transformation, Ballester on the one hand reaches back into its
pictorial past to reclaim its ability to absorb qualities once exclusive to
painting and on the other hand reaches forward into its future as pure
abstraction of colour and light. The careful staging of studio-based
pictorial photography informs his precise, formal style as much as the
extended artificiality of digitized colour characterizes his subtle palette,
which can also be adjusted to his satisfaction.
Since we have come to believe that photography is defined as a document
and record of reality, it is surprising to realize that what Ballester
pictures is not that world but his interpretation of it, made possible
by the transformative potential of computer manipulation. As much as
pictorial photography staged and lit static subjects, Ballester transforms
and interprets the visual world into a personal vision. Today
there are many photographers of buildings, a theme that lends itself
perfectly to the formalist needs of photography, as artists like Charles
Sheeler and Alfred Stieglitz showed us. However, one is hard put to
think of other photographers of the city itself as object. In this context,
the city displaces the hero as the transformative personage.
There are many analogies between Ballester’s cityscapes and Paul
Auster’s City of Glass, which purports to be a narration but ultimately
transforms New York into a palpable object that is crystallized, present
all at once as an object rather than as multiple moments of tranches de
vie. This idea of the city as object is an inversion of the Futurist vision of
the city as a blur of forward motion. Time is definitely a dimension in
Ballester’s vision, but it is time artificially stopped, images held in
suspension in a concrete way rather than as fugitive moments such as
the Impressionists wished to capture.
Largely because of economic considerations, contemporary art is
obliged to redefine itself as an object or installation destined for
museums and public buildings. Architects, the princes of the fine arts,
often dictate what their vassals, the painters and sculptors, create to
embellish their more and more daring edifices. Their activities interact
directly with commerce and are based on the latest innovations in
engineering technology. In the Renaissance, painters and sculptors also
practiced architecture as a second discipline. As vast sums of money
and technological know-how is now required, today that is no longer
true; painting and sculpture are reduced to ornaments in museums of
colossal scale. With a few exceptions, most notably Renzo Piano and
Rafael Moneo, architects, by deciding on the dimensions, materials
and properties of exhibition spaces, are increasingly usurping the
terrain of their fellow artists, fulfilling Ayn Rand’s prophecy, so dear to
Frank Lloyd Wright, of the architect as master of the universe.
Undoubtedly, one of the reasons Ballester has concentrated on
architecture as subject is the primacy of architecture in contemporary
culture. As city after city demands a logo or brand to proclaim its
identity, the architect and the patron become the decision makers who
decide what the environment will look like and how it will be used.
In an explosion of global competition, new cities are springing up
and older ones are transformed to keep up with social and technological
change. Parks, plazas and all manner of public works, including
purely commercial malls and towering office buildings, efface the
human scale that cities once had. Among the most popular of these
structures are cultural centres like music halls, theatres and especially
exhibition spaces.
The consequence is that today there are thousands upon thousands of
new, vacant exhibition spaces to be filled with, most logically, video and
installation art, which can be spread out to occupy vast areas. It is both
cheap relative to painting and sculpture as well as ephemeral, the better
to attract easily bored crowds who require constant stimulation with
novelty. The triumph of uninhibited technological innovation and the
rapidity of its pace permits dimensions previously unimaginable.
Indeed, these buildings are going up so fast that their functions are not
yet clearly established. Obviously they are containers, but containers for
what? The blurred line between what is public exhibition space and
what is private, intimate space becomes confused and interchangeable
in a technological culture constantly recording actions and conversations
as well as the places where they occur. This blurring of functions
fascinates Ballester, whose photographs of a hotel room and new art
exhibition spaces were the subject of Habitación 523, his 2005 exhibition
of mural-sized digital images printed on linen at the Palacio Velazquez
in Madrid.
Among the museums Ballester has photographed are the Moneo
enlargements of the Prado, the new galleries of the Museo Thyssen-
Bornemisza, the new Jean Nouvel wing of the Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofia and the renovated areas of the Tate Modern. The
New York suite contains images of P.S. 1, the contemporary showcase
of the Museum of Modern Art, as a ghostly space empty of exhibits or
spectators. Here once more the changing nature of the functions of
architecture is relevant, since P.S. 1 (as its name implies) was once a
public high school that closed when the neighbourhood was abandoned.
As an artist, José Manuel Ballester is as enigmatic as his photographs,
which are more impersonal than his paintings that tend increasingly to
be melancholy grisaille studies of buildings and city streets. Like
Flaubert, he has no other definition of himself than what he has created.
The absence of human figures accentuates the mural scale of Ballester’s
empty spaces. In New York he captures the glamour of the dazzling
lights from the immense advertisements glittering in the night. The
individual advertisements for entertainment, products or corporations
are coldly equalized. The point of view dramatically emphasizes their
dominance over the spectator and their cumulative power over society
and its needs, which they convert into unrealizable desires that become
the dreams of the masses.
Among his recent subjects is his library, which he contends represents
the artist’s world. It represents the contents of his or her mind. In
this connection, the publication of the contents of Jackson Pollock’s
library in volume IV of his catalogue raisonné is particularly illuminating.
Ballester’s library, not surprisingly, is full of books on painting and
photography as well as rich in technical and scientific literature.
He has become especially interested in 19th-century travel photography
of exotic sites in the Near East and Asia. The contrast between the
primitive states of colonial societies dominated by their Western
colonizers stands in stark relationship with the recent and sudden
transformations of these societies as they rapidly appropriate technology
developed in the West. His library includes neatly ordered
archives, categorized by place and date, that serve as reference material
for his touristic voyages. The archive is of course the most specific form
of the index on which so much recent theoretical literature is based. His
reflections on identity and diversity in the new cityscapes arising
throughout the world play a part in the images he chooses to capture
and isolate.
The crisis of urban planning that the current architectural orgy has
created is certainly one of the implied themes of Ballester’s images.
Today, an improvised favela in Brazil is as much part of the city as the
towering glass and steel skyscrapers. Ballester will soon photograph
Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Brazilia, the city designed from scratch
by Le Corbusier to become the new capital. Then he goes to India,
where, as in China, the poor, living on the edge of slavery, huddle in
inadequate habitats at the base of the fabulous new towers—just as
they once did in the shadow of the towers of medieval cathedrals.
Ballester’s attitude towards his subjects is neither critical nor approving.
It is observant and pensive. The stillness of the spaces he
photographs is as palpable as the light that filters through them. It is as
if the artist is putting the brakes on the speed of a technology changing
so quickly we have no time to stop and ask where it is going and for
what reason as we scramble to be the first to jump on the train before it
has even departed. Norbert Weiner defined cybernetics as “the human
use of human beings.” Today we are not so sure whether advances in
technology necessarily mean progress or a new dark age characterized
by dependency on a fragile system controlled by the few and used by
the many.
When asked why architecture is his principal subject, Ballester
answers that architecture provides the scenario of our lives, its theatre
and its actions. Humans must live in an artificially built environment
because we can no longer really live in nature even if we think it is
ideal. The city, he says, is an artifical construct we make to improve our
lives. But then the question arises of whether they are improved.
His is a questioning acceptance of contemporary reality. He sees and
makes us see that the spaces destined for art, culture and leisure are in
a state of crisis as a result of technological advances that generate new
problems without necessarily solving old ones. The emptiness he
pictures questions the profound changes in cities that technology
brings about. The negation of time leaves space for reflection, the
need to pause, think, understand and imagine the future—and its
consequences. He intentionally omits the anecdotal so that nothing
detracts from the sense of grandiose spaces like the new museums
built for collections that are now too expensive to acquire since the
funds to purchase them have been spent on the building in which they
were meant to be housed. The museum is par excellence the space
where the public meets the private. Those encounters now take place
not in the serenity of the Roman forum but in the bustling museum
café or the artificial nature of its garden.
Another characteristic of Ballester’s style is his incredible sensitivity
to colour as well as space, both of which relate to painting. He pairs red
with yellow and white, or prints a doorway in orange on an orange
field. His characteristic receding views through doorways recall the
receding space of Raphael’s School of Athens. He alludes to classical
formats but he does not pretend we live in a society of patrician
philosopher statesmen.
For two days Ballester walked around Broadway, feeling its pulse from
hour to hour before taking out his camera. He wanted to feel its rhythm
and the effect of the bombardment of flashing lights and competing
images. In these mobbed streets, the photographer is anonymous. That
anonymity becomes both a protection and a stage to define a point of
view that expresses emotional content, whether it is an elevator shaft
seen from below and digitally stretched to create curved spaces or the
chaos of messages and corporate logos on Times Square.
Ballester pays special attention to deep space, sharp focus, light, volume,
space, texture and colour. These are, of course, essentially the
elements of painting, not photography. Empty space becomes a pretext
for painterly volumes and a type of space associated with painting.
Ballester speaks of his sense of a debt to Titian, which we may see
reflected in his sensitive use of a diffused and soft light in studies of
interiors, especially in the photographs printed on linen. He is conscious
of the sheer quantities of boxes as well as of the brand names
they bear: a corporate global society of mass transport piled on the
docks of China’s new cities. Like the huge ads that blink like beacons on
Times Square, he turns them into rectangles of coloured light that recall
Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie.
It is this double consciousness—of the troubling reality of the present
as well as of the history of art—that distinguishes Ballester’s work.
Ballester’s approach to his subjects parallels that of the explorer who
seeks new adventures, never knowing exactly what he will see on a
safari. Perhaps his camera is a gun that brings home a new trophy to
grace a wall.
Ballester says that art is an instrument for self-examination, not an
end in itself. It is a heuristic tool that teaches you to know yourself and
consequently to know others and to compare cultures. In the United
States, for example, a democracy that emphasizes freedom and openness,
he is surprised that you need a permit to photograph public
spaces. But in China, presumably a closed dictatorship, he wanders
around and photographs anything that catches his eye without official
interference. And his photographs of the new city of Zhengzhou, while
exotically beautiful, are particularly disturbing; the function of what he
records is even more unknown and unpredictable than that of the
wonders of the Western world.
Spatial and colour manipulation as much as point of view may define
personal style in photography. Ballester’s style is also marked by a keen
sense of detail. He creates a sense of scale through the relationship of
intricate parts and apertures, solids and voids. The unexpected bulge
that contrasts the flatness of photography, the sense of being inside as
well as outside structures: Ballester sees each city as a personality
requiring a different palette to express its identity. The result it not the
fleeting Impressionist “moment,” but an indefinite suspension of time
while global expansion quickly changes the functions of the buildings
and cities whose forms he captures. The cumulative body of his work
speaks to the existential issues of Gauguin’s three questions: Where are
we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Ballester gives no
answers, but he makes us aware that there are critical decisions waiting
to be made.

Barbara Rose is an American art historian and critic, born in 1938. Her first book, American Art Since 1900 was published in 1967. She has published
over twenty monographs on artists and numerous exhibition catalogue essays and articles.