Erieta Attali is a young Greek photographer whose focus as an artist has tended to occupy a no man's land between landscape, archaeology, and architecture. What is evident from almost all of her images is that she possesses a very strong feeling for the representation and transmutation of topographic form irrespective of whether it is the parched landscape of her native land, the tombstones of Paestum, the Hudson River seen from the Upper West Side at twilight, or the ramp space of Bernard Tschumi's Lerner Hall at night. In every situation, and particularly in this last, the already ambiguous image of the volume becomes further inflected through the interplay of light and reflection creating a kind of parallel phantom space lying at once both inside and outside of the apparent field of the building; causing the curtain wall of Lerner Hall to duplicate its superstructure and engender ghostly, highly illuminated reflections that totally obliterate the actual landscape lying outside the glass.
A different effect is created in the case of the nocturnal shots of Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson's glass museum at Corning, New York. In this instance artificial light effectively dematerializes the substance of the building, flooding its volume so as to transform it into a giant lantern or alternatively to turn a screen into a luminous volume. To what extent are we justified in seeing these images as embodying the conceptual space-form of the building or are they simply autonomous exercises; aspiring to a kind of gratuitous chiaroscuro, wherein the building merely serves as a catalyst for quite independent aesthetic effects?
There is a latent kinetic aspect to many of these images, particularly in her transposed shots of the work of Dan Graham where one cannot quite suppress the thought that the photographer is on the verge of becoming a cameraman.
Kenneth Frampton
