The Walther Collection presents Destruction and Transformation: Vernacular Photography and the Built Environment, an exhibition that examines the decisive role of vernacular photography in capturing the convulsive cycles of change that define modernist topographies. Since the nineteenth century, engineers, city planners, architects, industrialists, and tourists have used photography to record and promote metropolitanism: a global affirmation of modern urban expansion, often at the expense of natural ecology, historic structures, or existing populations. The sixteen photographic series in this exhibition, spanning from 1876 to 2000, depict the inescapable obsolescence of urban and industrial projects, and together provide a counternarrative to the presupposed stability of aesthetic and structural planning within modernist city spaces and architecture.
Destruction and Transformation is on view from February 8 to May 25, 2019, and is the fourth exhibition in The Walther Collection’s multi-year series, “Imagining Everyday Life: Aspects of Vernacular Photography,” curated by Brian Wallis.
The Walther Collection Project Space
526 West 26th Street, Suite 718
New York, NY 10001
