With this interesting series called "Window Watching", the latter captured scenes from the life of his neighbors that he observed from his home.
The Transparent City
Architectural abstraction meets high-tech voyeurism in Michael Wolf’s recent photographic study of downtown Chicago.
Someone described this work as “Edward Hopper meets Blade Runner.”
But far from titillation, Wolf discovers a rather mundane loneliness in his windows — people staring into computers or gazing at television sets or napping alone in armchairs.
Many residents seem numbly isolated in sterile, generic boxes of rooms suspended in the sky away from any kind of grounded reality.
Writer and blogger Geoff Manaugh sees a direct correlation between these photographs and the psychological effect depicted in the 1975 novel by J. G.
Ballard, High-Rise. Ballard suggested that the nature of these buildings produces a “new social type.” Manaugh continues: These people have “minimal needs for privacy,”
living more “like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere” of the building.
Like an architectural mood stabilizer — or spatial Prozac — the building itself gives rise to an “unemotional personality,” someone who spends time
“waiting for something to happen” while doing nothing themselves. Wolf accentuates this feeling of alienation and “no exit” with tight cropping of each photograph,
so it is difficult to find any reassuring context even in a vast panorama.“You can never go off the building surface and find the sky,” Wolf says.
“I make these images so that the only escape is to peer into one of the windows.”
