This essay was commissioned from Zachęta National Gallery, Warsaw, in 2025 but not published. I have reproduced it here without illustratons. (The image above is from the film Diva, directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981)
In 1986, Barbara Kasten received a commission from Vanity Fair, the American up-market monthly magazine reporting on culture, fashion, and current affairs. At that time, she had established a reputation as a unique artist for her recent photographs composed in the studio with geometric props, classical columns as well as other architectural elements, and mirrors.[1] Unlike anything being created by her contemporaries, these installations – which she called Constructs – seemed to recall the experiments with abstraction conducted by artists and photographers associated with Constructivism and the Bauhaus sixty years earlier (though they were not, in a strict sense, abstract images). Indeed, Kasten had been a keen archaeologist of the avant-garde in the 1970s, seeking out overlooked figures like the photographer Florence Henri (whom she interviewed in Paris in the early 1980s) and researching the work of the far better-known László Moholy-Nagy, the founder, in 1937, of the “New Bauhaus,” the Institute of Design in Chicago.[2]
What stood out in Kasten’s photos in the early 1980s was not their reference to the modernist past but their vivid and intensely contemporary resonance, described by curator Robert Sobieszek as “distinctly fresh … metallized gloss, spatial gymnastics, and post-modern colors.”[3] The objects in her Constructs photos were mostly monochrome and assembled on a seamless white ground but, when carefully lit with gels, they pulsed with bright notes of colour or were washed with precisely pitched hues.[4] As if to reveal her method, Kasten sometimes showed the naked installation forms onto which she had cast colour alongside her photographs (for instance, at her solo show at John Weber Gallery in New York and at Karl Bornstein Gallery in Santa Monica in 1984). Technique was important. Working with large-format Polaroid cameras and Cibachrome prints, Kasten had developed new techniques for generating intensely chromatic photographs that seemed to glow. Indeed, under its Artist Support Program, the Polaroid Corporation gave Kasten access to an ultra-large camera in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced instant prints and had been developed in partnership with the Boston Museum of Fine Art in the late 1970s to make full-scale copies and detailed close-ups of the masterpieces in its collection.[5] Making full use of the rich colour emulsions and instant effects of Polaroid film back in her California studio, Kasten’s photographs required no post-production effects, such was her remarkable ability to manage light.
Kasten’s Vanity Fair brief was to depart the studio to photograph the lobbies of the showy corporate headquarters that had been recently constructed – under the flag of post-modernism – in Manhattan. Germinating in philosophical conversations about where meaning might be located in architecture in the early 1970s, Post-modern architecture had advanced rapidly to become the favourite style of the American corporation by the time of the commission. As Mary McLeod put it, “… what first emerged as endless freedom, by the mid-1980s seemed rigidified and codified. Mauve and gray, falling keystones, giant pilasters, and temple fronts had become ubiquitous clichés.”[6] One of Kasten’s Vanity Fair subjects, the World Financial Center – a quartet of glass- and granite-walled office towers designed by César Pelli Associates – was one such statement of the post-modern code. Each tower was capped with a different architectural form with ancient cosmological associations (a dome, two pyramids, and a mastaba): here were ancient civilisations in silhouette. And the lobby of the first tower – which Kasten photographed in 1986 – featured a high, vaulted ceiling much like the dome of a Renaissance cathedral: this was “public” space as architectural spectacle.
In the event, Vanity Fair did not publish the photographs, but Kasten continued to depict landmark buildings over the next four years, expanding the project by photographing others across the country in a series that she called Architectural Sites. Many of her subjects were museums keen to have Kasten record their new premises, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) on Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, designed by Arata Isozaki. She also turned her attention to monuments of late modernism, including Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, then twenty years old.
Working in situ, Kasten’s technique was a bold extension of ideas and methods that she had developed in the Constructs series. In the studio, she had used bright lamps with coloured gels and scrims to illuminate her compositions. With the camera shutter open, the chromatic lights were turned off according to a predetermined score to control light spillage and achieve the precise intensity of colour that she sought. In 1983, she described her method: “The multiple exposure … makes possible the layering of information. I can change elements, add or subtract color just as if I were painting. There is an on-the-spot pressure and intensity and involvement with the image and the sculpture that builds.”[7] Now, working through the long hours of the night, Kasten adapted her techniques, lighting the entrances of each of the hyperbolic entrances of the buildings with powerful tungsten lamps and coloured gels, and placing massive plexiglass mirrors in the sightline of the camera (one mirror cut by Kasten’s assistants was 3.65 m in diameter). Each lamp was precisely arranged to illuminate and colour a distinct architectural element of the setting. Overspills and unwanted shadows were carefully controlled. For instance, Pelli’s grey-veined marble elevated walkway in the entrance of One World Financial Center in lower Manhattan was curdled fluorescent green and yellow, while the double-height domed ceiling, bathed in hot pink light, was reflected precisely in a tilted circular mirror positioned on a raised walkway. The effect was strange, the reflection appearing like a pinball riding the rails of the elevated platform. As such, it was also, perhaps, an oblique comment on the business done there.
Each shot required a team of ten people or more, whom Kasten recruited from the film industry. Candid photographs and video footage taken during the creation of Architectural Site 17 in the lobby of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta designed by Richard Meier shows Kasten as a director, peering into the viewing plate of the camera to check the composition and using a walkie-talkie to instruct her team to move and trim the lamps positioned on the ramps and balconies above.[8] The scene is remarkably busy, the lobby jumbled with cables, power generators, and lighting rigs. By contrast, the resulting image is crisp and exact. Interviewed in July 1989 for a report on the overnight toils in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Pavilion for Japanese Art, Kasten reflected on her process: “It’s a performance, an event.”[9] This emphasis on the photographic event was underlined by the date appended to the title of each work, in this case Architectural Site 19, July 19, 1989.
Each shot required considerable planning, too. After securing permission to photograph, Kasten would survey the building months in advance, taking small test Polaroids to record the scene. She would then use this material to plan the shot, working out where to place the camera, lighting, and mirrors in advance. Her sketchbooks – sometimes exhibited alongside the final works – contain hand-coloured layouts and Polaroid prints marked up with precise notes. Returning to the site with her crew, she would then create one or two of these shots in situ. The resulting images were then editioned as impressive large-format Cibachrome prints (some as large as 150 x 127 cm).
The mirrors performed a particular function in Kasten’s Architectural Sites, interrupting and warping the monumental spaces of these landmarks. Two circular mirrors positioned in the entrance to the Lipstick Building, a newly opened Manhattan tower at 885 Third Avenue designed by John Burgee and the veteran Philip Johnson, seem to suck the regular chequerboard floor, marble reception desk, and vertical columns into two liquescent pools. Kasten’s use of mirrors was likely indebted to a modernist conception of the image that had first been articulated by Futurists in late Imperial Russia and had been thoroughly developed by modernist artists in Weimar Germany under the concept of ostranenie, or “making strange.”[10] Artists – particularly photographers – developed techniques to delay perception, in the belief that this might break habitual, unthinking ways of comprehending the world. Photomontage, photograms, aerial shots, X-rays, and the widespread use of reflections in mirrors and chrome surfaces were deployed in this new aesthetics of defamiliarisation. No mere reflection of the world, photography – if understood as an extensive and growing set of tools and techniques for image construction – had the potential to inculcate a “New Vision,” Moholy-Nagy’s term for an improved or reformed perception. Perhaps, as Sabine Kriebel suggests, the talismanic object for this task was the mirrored ball, which featured frequently in Bauhaus photographs by figures such as Florence Henri, Marianne Brandt, Georg Muche, Joost Schmidt and Walter Funkat. Convex reflection extended the capacity of a camera to record the setting: “such photographic-specular vision renders each element in synchronous focus, issuing a seamless spatial-tactile montage of interior space in which the particularity of floor patterning before us cohabits with the distant ceiling and windows behind us in a single, grounded, pictorial field impossible to conjure with the ordinary camera.”[11]
Kasten’s approach to defamiliarisation was certainly indebted to the New Vision of the 1920s, but it was also at odds with the main line of architectural photography that was being developed in Europe at the same time. Then, the nascent Modern Movement in architecture promoted its programmes and ideas in a flood of illustrated periodicals and books that spread its influence rapidly across continent and North and South America. International Style buildings were made into conspicuous icons by careful image management.[12] Career-making reputations were made by architects whose designs were recorded and broadcast in compelling images: a well-composed photograph could furnish evidence of an ability to command the architectural elements of materials, space, movement, and light. Often working in close partnership with their architect-clients, photographers came to see their role as communicating the readability, structure, and spatial logic of the buildings they depicted. Ezra Stoller, probably the most in-demand architectural photographer in the USA after the Second World War, presented himself as a servant to the building in an interview in 1996: “Really, to be honest, there is no way of viewing architecture without viewing architecture. You cannot do it from a photograph even, although I think still photography is as close as you can get. It is a statement. And if the photographer can subdue his own reaction, his own contribution enough, then it will be a valid statement.”[13]
The conventions of architectural photography were well established by Stoller and others, and are maintained in the architectural press to the present day. Exteriors are typically depicted with wide-angled lenses and dramatic vantage points to emphasise the building as a volume, often in three-quarter view. The camera seems to offer a sense of the building as an autonomous whole, a perspective rarely encountered in the distracting circumstances of everyday life. Shadows produced by the bright play of daylight have much the same distinguishing function. Tilt-shift lenses are employed to ensure that straight lines of geometry prevail over the skews that typically result from lens distortion. Interiors are treated in much the same way, with architectural photographers accentuating the openness of spaces and the textures of building materials. The promise to the viewer is one of likeness: this is what the building looks like, feels like – though, as numerous critics have averred, architectural photography has often been more committed to producing attractive illusions – “craven images” – that flatter architects and their clients alike.[14] Indeed, in his wide-ranging 1991 analysis of post-modernism, Fredric Jameson accused contemporary architects of designing photogenic buildings to function as publicity.[15] Comparing the photographic simulation of architecture with the visionary sketches and designs of unnamed architects (perhaps he had the Deconstructivists like Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid in mind), Jameson wrote:
… the work of a certain number of very interesting contemporary or postcontemporary architects consists exclusively of the drawing of imaginary buildings which will never cast a real shadow in the light of day. The project, the drawing, is then one reified substitute for the real building, but a “good” one, that makes infinite Utopian freedom possible. The photograph of the already existing building is another substitute, but let us say a “bad” reification – the illicit substitution of one order of things for another, the transformation of the building into the image of itself, and a spurious image at that.[16]
For Jameson, the drawing of an unbuilt (or perhaps as-yet-unbuilt) structure could hold a place in the radical tradition of modernism because it might escape the inhibiting forces of the economy, the egos of clients, or even gravity.
In contrast to the conventionalising effects of much architectural photography, Kasten’s Architectural Sites of the late 1980s eschew the promise of likeness. Her chromatic effects are highly artificial, eclipsing any associations with the ordinary world as it is experienced, each intoxicating hue fighting its neighbour for retinal attention: intense blue against vivid orange, its spectral opposite; or a mauve as hot as the poached yellow nearby. Kasten’s placement of tilted mirrors on floors produced puzzling optical effects in which right angles dissolve, and walls and ceilings ripple like liquid pools. Angular mirrors and dark, shadowy wedges – thrust into the scene – break the photographic illusion of perspectival recession, disrupting any certain sense of what might be close to hand or far away, or what might be large or small. Often lacking doors or clear windows, these lobbies are closed worlds too, places that seem to offer few – if any – perspectives on what might lie outside. The city beyond remains obscure, usually because the scene was captured in the pitch darkness of night. When Kasten shot the exterior of Donovan Hall, a grey concrete pavilion framed with freestanding columns that formed part of Loyola Law School designed by Frank Gehry, for instance, nothing in her image suggests its downtown Los Angeles setting. The overall effect of the Architectural Sites series is one of rich, dreamy confusion, in which inside and outside, volume and surface, day and night are difficult to distinguish, and the recognition of elements such as domes, balconies, and pilotis does little to aid orientation. Real spaces serving real functions are made to seem more like stage sets than places of business or education. But what did these Kasten photographs have to say about – or to – contemporary architecture? Were they critique or celebration? And what should be made of her updated variety of ostranenie?
For one, Kasten brought a distinctly oblique perspective to these architectural masterpieces (and perhaps a little antipathy to the gendered prejudice that this term harbours). Sometimes this entailed viewing askance, but almost always it meant what Patricia Philips called an “alternative, non-iconic dimension of the building that is ostensibly her subject”. [17] Writing in 1989, Philips credited Kasten with critique: “Her temporary occupancies of major cultural sites are quiet occasions of sabotage that challenge the final word of the architect and the inflexible authority of the monumental building.”[18]
One can press this point further by considering the labyrinthine spatial arrangements which Kasten educed from these modernist and post-modernist landmarks. Buildings which signalled prestige (and often, as Jameson noted, had been designed to be photogenic) were purposefully disordered in her photographs. Indeed, the labyrinth was one of the key tropes of architectural theory in the late 1970s and 1980s, featuring regularly in the writings and drawings of a new generation of theorising architects drawn to post-structuralist ideas emanating from France and disdainful of the opportunism and pragmatism of their profession. In their early “paper architecture” schemes and theoretical texts, future Deconstructivist architects Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind shared an interest in this spatial metaphor. With its origins in Greek mythology, and its frequent recurrence in modernist literature (Kafka, Joyce, Borges, Calvino, Eco, and others), the labyrinth offered a recursive figure of a decentered structure in which meaning – or resolution – was perpetually deferred in the endless task of navigation. Likewise, Giambattista Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons series of etchings (Carceri d’invenzione, 1745-50) drew renewed attention in the late 1970s, with theorists and architects drawn to the Italian architect’s depictions of a maze-like world in which it is impossible to tell what is interior and what is exterior, or who might be a guard and who is a prisoner. Worm’s eye views, deep contrasts of light and shadow, and dead ends inferred a nightmarish setting. Although not declared as such, Piranesi’s paper architecture offered its own version of ostranenie, as Italian architectural theorist Manfredo Tafuri noted in his 1980 book The Sphere and the Labyrinth, writing of “the constant disintegration of the coherence of structure that, nonetheless, has a precise function. It is, in fact, just this disintegration that induces the spectator to recompose laboriously the spatial distortions, to reconnect the fragments of a puzzle that proves to be, in the end, unsolvable.”[19] In this understanding, the labyrinth was not a maze to be escaped or a puzzle to be completed by means of logic and science. Indeed, for some architects in the 1970s, the labyrinth provided a model for a new and alternative conception of architecture, precisely because it defied the hegemony of reason and the dominance of vision. For instance, the Swiss-French architect teaching in London’s Architectural Association, Tschumi argued in a 1975 manifesto-like essay called “The Question of Space”, that because the Labyrinth could not be comprehended rationally as a whole, it provided a way of understanding architecture as a sensual, embodied experience.[20]
Kasten did not evince the weighty intellectualism of these – largely European – architect-critic-philosophers. She has typically presented her activities as intuitive. Moreover, she brought a kind of North American can-do spirit to her remarkably-ambitious and demanding night-time labours. But there were affinities between her highly novel approach to architectural depiction and Deconstructivist architecture – a theory-rich field that was packaged into a high-profile movement by an exhibition at MoMA in New York in 1988.[21] Relatively young architects like Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid were championed as the new avant-garde for designs that fragmented and torqued space, as well as for their overturning of architectural conventions. For Mark Wigley, one of the curators exhibiting their designs at MoMA, these new radicals revived a “threat to tradition” that had first been issued by the Soviet Constructivists and Suprematists of the 1920s: “… each project employs formal strategies developed by the Russian [sic] avant-garde early in the twentieth century. Russian Constructivism constituted a critical turning point where the architectural tradition was bent so radically that a fissure opened up through which certain disturbing architectural possibilities first became visible. Traditional thinking about the nature of the architectural object was placed in doubt. But the radical possibility was not then taken up. The wound in the tradition soon closed, leaving but a faint scar. These projects reopen the wound.”[22] Wigley surely overplayed the radicalism of architects like Libeskind and Hadid in 1988, as their later careers as builders perhaps demonstrate; nevertheless, the movement – in its “visionary” phase – did offer a critical interrogation of the language of architecture, as well as the facile codes of architectural post-modernism.
Consider Daniel Libeskind’s early labyrinthine drawings, produced when teaching at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, such as his Micromegas Project series (1979). Libeskind’s drawing cycle takes its name from Voltaire’s eighteenth-century novella, a work of proto-science fiction describing the journeys of a being called Micromegas (literally small-large), who travels from a distant planet orbiting Sirius to our solar system and eventually to Earth. Fragments, evidently drawn from the lexicon of architectural drawing, are combined by Libeskind. Some parts look like axonometric sections, others like plans, and structural forms pile up as if an explosion has occurred, or as if gravity is no longer the governing force in this universe. As in Voltaire’s story, perspective and scale constantly shift in Libeskind’s drawings. Other examples can be invoked here too: a few years later, in 1988, Zaha Hadid, an architect who had established a studio in London at the start of decade, entered one of her signature dynamic architectural designs into a competition for the redevelopment of the area between Kurfürstendamm and Kantstrasse in what was then West Berlin. With its double title (aiming at a Derridean wordplay), Victoria City Aerial / Areal presented an exhilarating set of paintings to represent a scheme for a nine-storey “master block” – including a bent slab that Hadid called the Blue Beam – containing offices, hotel and retail spaces, as well as elevated footbridges and ramps cantilevered out into the surroundings to produce what Hadid called “horizontal” density. [23] With suggestive strokes of primary colour against a blue field, Hadid’s Victoria City paintings expressed none of the conventional tectonic concerns of architects or the social and economic priorities of city planners. Instead, the design alluded – abstractly – to ideas about transparency, flow, light and movement. It was as if the Blue Beam had issued a pulsing red wave of energy into the city.
In her Architectural Sites series, Kasten engaged in an act of deconstruction, albeit in her own way. Her chromatic effects, and the use of mirrors, effectively separated out different elements of the construction, reordering and rescaling them in ways that defied architectonic order. The vivid washes of coloured light were excessive and, in a strict sense, unnecessary. And they departed from almost all of the ways that architects have typically thought about the purpose of colour: namely, as enhancing a sense of place and location; as glassy surfaces for reflection of the changing sky or the environment around; as permanent; or as an effect of materials like glossy marble.[24] Nor did they subscribe to any system of colour symbolism. Yet her precise light and colour effects gave the appearance of being induced or, perhaps what the Surrealist André Breton called “convulsed”, as if something invisible was being discovered or revealed. Were the colours a litmus test? Or perhaps they had boiled up through the surface like a polychromatic blush, or, perhaps more darkly, a bruise. Do these cosmetic colours embellish or conceal?
Perhaps the best way to understand Kasten’s chromatic treatment of these buildings – so very unnatural in luminescence and hue – is to consider her approach as being cinematic in the way that some contemporary movie directors adopted specific colours. The stylish hits of art house cinema of the late 1970s and 1980s – the films of Dario Argento (Suspiria, 1977, and Inferno, 1980), the cinéma du look of French directors Luc Besson (Subway, 1985) and Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva, 1981), and David Lynch (Blue Velvet, 1986) – feature entire scenes flooded with intense coloured filters. Highly saturated reds, greens and blues, accompanied by strong contrasts of light and shadow, had the effect of making ordinary and familiar settings seem hallucinatory.
One example will suffice here: Diva, a French thriller once credited with introducing post-modernism into French cinema,[25] follows Jules, a young postman and opera fan in Paris, who illegally records a performance by the celebrated American soprano Cynthia Hawkins and steals her stage gown. When the recording falls into the hands of criminals and corrupt flics, Jules is pursued in a spectacular chase across the labyrinthine city. He has a stage lamp in his bedroom with a rotating colour wheel loaded with identical blue gels. Beineix’s cinematographer, Phillipe Rousselot, lingers on the lamp as it turns. This is not a device to “break the fourth wall” by revealing an ordinarily hidden technical apparatus, nor is it a ready symbol in, say, the manner of the diva’s pure white gown: rather, it presents the blue beam as a recurrent character. Sometimes the all-pervasive azurine light emanates from neon signs and video screens, or from what Jameson, in his analysis of the film, called the “secret blueness of the Parisian night sky”; but often, it comes from nowhere at all.[26] In Diva, iridescent blueness seeps inside through shuttered windows, opaque glass bricks, and under doors. Here, the light was not supplied by what film makers call a practical light, i.e. a source that appears to exist in the scene, like a bonfire or a car headlight. Rather, it was cast onto the scene – whether filmed in the studio or in the streets of the city – from lighting rigs. Occasionally, the colour switches completely and with dramatic intent, particularly during the long chase scene through the cerise glow of the tunnels between metro stations or the vert clair spilling on to Avenue Foch at night. Whether red, green, or blue, Beineix used colour, in his words, “to bring everything halfway between dream and reality”.[27]
A popular hit, Diva was nevertheless accused by its critics – well schooled in the intellectual traditions of French Marxism – of succumbing to the aesthetics of advertising and celebrating commodity culture.[28] Beineix was reproached for being seduced by surfaces: his attention to synthetic colour was an unmistakable “tell”. Later, and in response, Beineix claimed to be taking back colour and beauty from the parasitical phenomenon of advertising.[29] Beineix’s attempt to recuperate colour involved a kind of heightened exaggeration, perhaps to the point of irony. This, along with the rich veins of nostalgia and pastiche driving the plot of Diva, and shaping its mise-en-scènes and the action of its on-screen characters, is what lent the film its reputation as a pioneering post-modern movie.
One suspects that Kasten was less concerned with wresting colour back from commodity culture or in the effects of irony than with the matter of beauty. (Indeed, she took on a handful of commercial commissions at this time, including an advertisement for Quark software, and a photoshoot in the manner of her Constructs series that incorporated historic garments from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the autumn 1986 issue of Esquire magazine. Alex Klein characterises such work as a reflection of economic necessity.[30]) Above all, in her large Cibachrome prints she was concerned with mood, with the psychological and even phenomenological effects of these polychromatic shots on the viewer. Here, it is the fervent chromophilia of the Architectural Sites that counts: in some images, lipstick pink meets midnight blue, apple green, and Venetian red; in others, the palette is dusky. No matter, their chromatic effects are always vivacious, and vertiginous. Light is energy. This may, in part, account for the positive response that Kasten received from some of the architects whose work she photographed. Klein writes that Kasten “recalls that when she visited Isozaki in Japan he told her that when he first saw her photographs of MoCA he was delighted to discover that he did not recognize his own building.”[31] This was an unexpected defamiliarisation.
Kasten’s Architectural Sites series ended with the decade, though architecture remains a central concern and inspiration in her art today. The time and cost involved in negotiating permissions to sites and booking in crews was considerable, and perhaps the project had run its course. Kasten refocused her attention, though she continued to photograph sites using mirrors and gels. For instance, in 1988 she was invited by the Stony Brook Foundation to produce an edition of Cibachromes for the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center on Long Island. The resulting triptych combines photographs of Jackson Pollock’s studio floor – inadvertently dowsed with his trademark drips when painting his canvases – with exterior night shots of trees flooded with red light, and details of Hans Namuth’s famous photo portraits of Pollock and his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, cast in a mauve sheen. What is perhaps more significant was a self-initiated project in 1990 to photograph the Puyé Cliff Dwellings in Northern New Mexico, a settlement carved out of soft volcanic rock by its first inhabitants 800 years ago, whose descendants live today in nearby Santa Clara Pueblo. Kasten recalled her feelings at the time:
… this was a soul-searching time; I was thinking about where to go after “Constructs” and “Architectural Sites”, and these works were like stepping stones back to what I felt was important, which was my experiences in the Southwest. I grew up in Chicago, and when I moved to the Southwest with my parents, it changed my life. I was fascinated with the history and its native American cultures that I respect and feel really drawn to. So I went back to what I knew … These were real photographic shoots: I got up at the crack of dawn with an assistant and we crossed fields and photographed these amazing places. It was very cathartic for me.[32]
Securing their permission to photograph on site, Kasten worked to produce a series called The Kiva Sequence as well as other images of the desert landscape. No longer were mirrors involved, but the lighting rigs remained, carried – along with the electrical generators – by Kasten and her assistant over fields to the location. The resulting sequence – five studies of the site bathed in blue light with glowing red accents and bearing lyrical titles such as Breath of the Dead and The Ruins – formed the end of one phase and the beginning of another in Kasten’s work.
The Kiva on which Kasten trained her lens and her lights is a ceremonial communal space used by Pueblo peoples and their ancestors for ritual and community activities.[33] Often a round underground chamber with thick earth and stone walls, a Kiva is accessed from above by a ladder, and may features symbolic elements such as the Sipapu, the Hopi word a small hole in the floor marking the place of emergence of the ancestors from the underworld. In Pueblo cosmology, a Kiva is a site of connection between the underworld, the earth, and the sky. Kasten evidently knew this well, titling one work – a view down a ladder into the heart of the Kiva – ‘The Centre’. Clearly, as an architectural subject, this sacred structure was very different from the profane post-modern landmarks which Kasten had photographed a few years earlier, despite the symbolic ornaments which their architects gave them. (Recall the cosmological silhouettes capping Pelli’s Manhattan towers.) Here, in New Mexico, the Kiva was a deeply-grounded place with all the metaphysical associations of that term; one that was unlike any other and, indeed, Kasten set herself the task of its authentic representation. This meant a light touch, in both senses of the phrase. Moreover, the blue – which prevailed in The Kiva Sequence – was not strictly ‘hers’, nor were its associations open to free-ranging speculation. Blue – or, more precisely, hues on the blue-green spectrum – carries deeply-rooted associations among different Pueblo communities, usually connected to the life-giving properties of water, to the sky and also to the earth from which the minerals for glazes and precious stones come.[34] Ultimately, the mood of the work was far emotional than her treatment of the architectural landmarks of post-modernism, with critics describing Kasten’s New Mexico photographs as eerie, ethereal, and marked by foreboding, perhaps sensing in them a deep sense of disappearance.[35] This was, at once, a first and a last “architectural site”.
[1] This essay is indebted to Alex Klein’s detailed and excellent scholarship into Kasten’s life and work. See Barbara Kasten: Stages (Zurich: JP Ringier, 2015), a catalogue for the major exhibition that Klein curated at ICA Philadelphia.
[2] See C.S. Eliel, “The Spirit of Experimentation: Barbara Kasten and László Moholy-Nagy” Leonardo, 50 (3) (2017), 321–24, 307–10.
[3] Robert Sobieszek, curatorial statement written in conjunction with Kasten’s exhibition at International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Boston, November 1981 cited in Alex Klein, “Chronology” in Barbara Kasten: Stages (Zurich: JP Ringier, 2015), 180.
[4] Constructs. Photographs by Barbara Kasten (New York: New York Graphic Society Books) 1985.
[5] Phyllis Lehman, “Money and markets” in The Cultural Post, v. 8, no. 1, 1983, np.
[6] Mary McLeod, “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism” in Assemblage, 8, (February 1989), 37.
[7] Barbara Kasten, In Color: Ten California Photographers, exhibition catalogue (Oakland, California, The Oakland Museum, 1983) cited by Alex Klein in “Chronology” in Barbara Kasten: Stages (Zurich: JP Ringier, 2015), 181.
[8] See “Behind the scenes of Barbara Kasten’s Architectural Site 17” filmed by Lucinda W. Bunnen on 29 August 1988 – available at https://link.underexposed.high.org/– accessed January 2026
[9] Suzanne Muchnic, “A Photographer Who Does It With Mirrors” in Los Angeles Times, (19 July 1989) – available online https://www.latimes.com/ – accessed January 2026
[10] On the history of this concept, see Simon Watney, “Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror” in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London: MacMillan Press, 1982), 154-176.
[11] Sabine Kriebel, “Florence Henri’s Oblique” in October, 172, (2020), 8–34.
[12] See Peter Blundell Jones, “The Photo-dependent, the Photogenic and the Unphotographable: How our Understanding of the Modern Movement has been Conditioned by Photography,” in Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, ed. Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray (London: Routledge, 2012), 172–99.
[13] D. Naegele, “An interview with Ezra Stoller” in History of Photography, 22(2) (1998), 115.
[14] This is Tom Picton’s term in“The Craven Image or the apotheosis of the architectural photograph” in Architects Journal, (25 July 1979), 175-190; 225-242.
[15] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991), 99.
[16] Jameson, Postmodernism, 124-125.
[17] Patricia C. Phillips, “Barbara Kasten: International Center of Photography Midtown” in Artforum, 28, no. 4 (December 1989), 138.
[18] Ibid
[19] Tafuri summarises here May Sekler’s interpretation of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons series. See The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 26. The book appeared first in Italian as La Sfera e il labirinto: Avanguardia e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ’70.
[20] Bernard Tschumi, “The Paradox of Architecture” in Studio International (September/October 1975), 136-142.
[21] Deconstructivist Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, June-August 1988, MoMA, New York.
[22] Mark Wigley, “Deconstructivist Architecture” in the MoMA book published to accompany the exhibition (New York: MoMA, 1988), 11.
[23] Aaron Betsky and Zaha Hadid, Zaha Hadid. The Complete Buildings and Projects (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 49.
[24] See Tom Porter, Architectural Color: A Design Guide to Using Color on Buildings (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1982).
[25] See Dudley Andrew, “Feeling Film as the Pulse of the Postmodern Condition. On Jameson’s “On Diva”’ in Keith B. Wagner, Jeremi Szaniawski, and Michael Cramer, eds., Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022), 33-53. This discussion of Diva is indebted to Phil Powrie, Jean- Jacques Beineix (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
[26] Fredric Jameson, “Diva and French Socialism” in Fredric Jameson, Signature of the
Visible (London: Routledge, 1992), 55-62.
[27] Beineix cited in Powrie, Jean- Jacques Beineix, 81.
[28] See Patricia Allmer, “’Window Shopping’? Aesthetics of the Spectacular and Cinéma du Look” in Scope (February 2004) np.
[29] Beineix cited in Powrie, Jean- Jacques Beineix, 20.
[30] Klein, “Chronology”, 183.
[31] Klein, “Chronology”, 184.
[32] Kasten speaking in conversation with Stephanie Bailey, 7 October 2020 published as “Barbara Kasten: Out of the Box” at https://ocula.com/ – accessed January 2026.
[33] John W. Friesen, “Formal Schooling among the Ancient Ones: The Mystique of the Kiva” in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, v. 17 (1993), 55-68.
[34] See Will Russell, Sarah Klassen, and Katherine Salazar, “Lines of communication: Mimbres hachure and concepts of color” in American Antiquity, 83 (2017), 1-19.
[35] For an analysis of The Kiva Sequence and other works made by Kasten in New Mexico in 1990 see James R. Hugunin, “From ‘catop-tricks’ to ‘Cliff Dwellings’: the Art of Barbara Kasten” in Art Criticism, Volume 8, Number 2 (1993), 1-15.
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