Waterworks: Photographs by Carole Starr Schein

WATERWORKS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAROLE STARR SCHEIN

The Keller Gallery at MIT Architecture

EXHIBITION DESIGN AND CURATION SARAH M. HIRSCHMAN

EXHIBITION TEAM CLAY ANDERSON

CURATORIAL ADVISOR ANDREA FRANK

PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT SOFIA BERINSTEIN

EXHIBITION DOCUMENTATION JUDITH M. DANIELS, SA+P THE KELLER GALLERY AT MIT ARCHITECTURE ROOM 7-408, MIT 77 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE CAMBRIDGE, MA 02139-2307

SERIES EDITOR

SARAH M. HIRSCHMAN

PUBLISHER SA+P PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MA 2013

PRINTER PURITAN PRESS HOLLIS, NH

CONTACT SA+P PRESS ROOM 7-337, MIT 77 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE CAMBRIDGE, MA 02139-2307

ISBN 978-0-9835082-5-0 ©2013 SA+P PRESS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION

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EXHIBITED IMAGES

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PERSPECTIVE

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A CONVERSATION ABOUT INSPIRATION CAROLE STARR SCHEIN AND SARAH HIRSCHMAN

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND REALITY DANIELA COVARRUBIAS

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WATERWORKS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAROLE STARR SCHEIN WAS PRESENTED IN THE KELLER GALLERY AT MIT ARCHITECTURE IN MAY 2012.

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WATERWORKS

Before the Waterworks Museum in Chestnut Hill, Boston was restored and opened to the public in 2011, it suffered decades of neglect, disuse, and looting. Built in 1887, designed by Arthur Vinal, Boston City Architect at the time, to pump water from the nearby reservoir into the Boston water system, the building also housed the first testing lab for municipal water in the country.

Rescued from demolition by concerned citizen groups and developers, the Waterworks has been restored as a museum, and many ancillary buildings have now become residences.

When Carole Starr Schein visited in November of 1997, however, restoration of the Waterworks was a distant dream. Her camera captured the cobwebs and history locked inside the disused building, and the magnificent arcs of powerful machinery halted mid-pump.

It has been said, and Schein asserts, that an image that is time deep is richer than those that are dealing with the present and the new. By using light and texture, the images are transformed into objects of mystery, irony, and elegance. Age transforms strong lines into soft design. You should be able to find within the present world a tracery of hints, remnants, and ghosts of the world past.

These photographs are presented as a document of decay in progress, the liminal period between function and preservation.

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EXHIBITED IMAGES

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PERSPECTIVE

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A CONVERSATION ABOUT INSPIRATION NEWTON, MA; AUGUST 20, 2012

Carole Starr Schein and Sarah Hirschman Sarah Hirschman: So Kelly, how did you get your start in photography? Were you This conversation has been an artist that moved into photography or did you start with a camera?

edited for length and clarity.

Carole Starr Schein: As I look back through my life, I realize that people always told me that I had an eye. When I married a young architect, something came out in me that I had not previously been aware of.

My husband and I traveled a lot with my sister and her husband, and the two men were both so scientific about photography. They spent so much time talking about ‘what is your f-stop here, what is your exposure there, what kind of film are you using, what angle should we shoot from?’ I became so bored listening to it that I decided that my only defense would be to pick up a camera myself.

I took pictures, but one particular picture I took of a little boy crossing Lake Titicaca in the same boat as us . . . it was just what I saw, but people started to really rave about it. I decided, well, maybe I should take more pictures! It’s as simple as that.

I just kept going. It was at a crucial point in my life, because my husband was ill and died. And at that point, I asked myself, ‘am I ever going to have an eye now that he’s gone? Am I ever going to do this?’ And I realized that most of this mythic eye was one that I had created.

And then I let my eye take the lead. For example, I was in Europe once with my sister - we were traveling in Naples. We came across a doll hospital. It was closed, but through the windows, I saw such enchanting things that I just couldn’t take my eyes off them. I said, ‘I have to come back here.’

I went to a doll hospital in New York, then I started to go to doll auctions and people’s homes. I did not seek perfection, and I didn’t want perfection in anything because that isn’t life. And I felt in a way I was resurrecting many of these dolls that were really ready to be discarded. And I gave them a new life, certainly in a new way because they were broken, cracked, in distress.

And so that was a project for me and I went after it. And then for some reason from there I went to cemeteries, perhaps it was because they were also dealing with the past. Also, there were photographs in many cemeteries in a certain time period.

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From the cemeteries, I started to look at abandoned structures.

I never really thought of Cleveland Circle or Boston Waterworks until I had photographed mental hospitals, a jail, some factories, the floor of a shipyard – all buildings that were abandoned or in disuse at the time.

SH: In the case of the Waterworks, once you’d identified that you were curious about it, what was your next step in starting the project?

CSS: I called the resource people to gain entry as an interested artist. I never had an agenda, I was just curious. I was never refused at any of these sites, just accompanied around them for insurance reasons.

SH: I know it was important when we were putting together the show that your images are actually a document of a kind of decay that doesn’t exist anymore. Do you feel that your photographs fit into the historic trajectory of the building in terms of its recent restoration as a museum?

CSS: I’ll tell you, I don’t think they do – I think they’re artistic works. This isn’t about the building.

SH: I think it’s interesting in questions of preservation about what phase we preserve, or what level of decay a building needs to get to in order for us to talk about preserving it. Your photographs, and especially the way that they’re framed and composed, are almost abstractions, not about the Waterworks as a whole. The images seem to be more about mechanics or geometry than anything else.

CSS: I never thought about the technicality as much as the shape. The one shape relating to the other, the light and the dark on some surfaces did not show decay the way that other surfaces did.

SH: In your own narratives, the images are about going to South America or to Italy, or about driving by and having an idea - do your photographs preserve for you some of the emotions and excitements that you felt? Do they work as documents of process, and is that something you can communicate to others?

CSS: They are all very personal images and I need to have that personal connection. A friend of mine once asked, ‘have you seen this particular building in Cambridge?’ I drove by and it didn’t move me. I didn’t have any desire. I didn’t see any angles or anything that I would like to commit my eye to. Period. I can’t force it.

SH: So it’s purely instinctual . . . you don’t go out looking for the photograph, the photograph finds you?

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CSS: Absolutely, without a doubt. Once I’m in a project, like for example when I was shooting the Children’s Mental Hospital, right next to Belmont in Waltham, it interests me, I can get a feeling for it in any part. But if it doesn’t interest me, I can’t. I did Boston State Hospital, even though it was really in decay, and now it’s all condominiums.

SH: It’s actually quite telling that a lot of the buildings that you have photographed in decay have now become condominiums.

CSS: That is of interest to me. To me, it makes the photographs more meaningful. At a certain point in time, the future really was in question for these buildings. They could have been demolished completely.

SH: Also economically, it’s such a different attitude. Your photographs are of these buildings at an in-between point, before their value has been reestablished.

They’re decaying, they’re abandoned, and they’re not yet nostalgic. Nobody was going to walk in there when you were in there and say, ‘Oh, this would be a great luxury residence!’

CSS: My journey in photography I feel has enhanced my life tremendously and it has coincided with documenting a particular time for my subjects. It gives me a form of expression that I never had as a young person. As I get older, I recognize it and I see, and it helps me see. Photography has made me extremely aware of my vision. Every angle I can see now.

SH: So it’s almost photography bleeding back into your experience of reality?

CSS: Yes. I think that’s it. You know, art can stem from the tide of loss, you know.

And basically, that’s what a lot of this is. It is loss - loss of usefulness, loss of usage, loss of importance.

You know transmogrification? Objects that are transformed. I think doing something with abandoned things, with abandonment, that is transformation. It’s catching the moment before there’s a change. And I think I transmogrify.

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND REALITY DANIELA COVARRUBIAS Invented in the first decades of the 19th century, photography upended traditional image-making processes. Instead of manual translation from eye to pencil to paper, the camera produces images by chemically recording reflection onto a lightsensitive material. The methods and tools associated with photography were very much based in a technical knowledge of chemistry and physics. This association with science easily created a sense that the image produced was objective, an

Daniela Covarrubias is in the Master of Architecture program at MIT. She previously studied at Washington University in St. Louis and received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture in 2010.

index of reality – and the reputation for truth held long after manipulative editing tools were developed.

A device to capture light The types of control available in the production of a photograph would soon open up a new mode of artistic practice. From the beginning, an entire spectrum of manipulations was part of the photographic process: the arrangement of a scene, the act of cropping, the lighting (natural or imposed), and further manipulations in the darkroom all affected the outcome of a photograph. Though the photograph may have been at first accepted as a reproduction of reality, it was always a product tailored by the eye and mind of the photographer.

A bias of context Although we may recognize that photographers have a series of tools and techniques at their disposal to produce an image, the greatest power of a photograph remains its simulation of reality. A photographer doesn’t need to do anything special to establish a basic level of trust in the image. However, trust does vary depending on the context. A photograph on the wall of a gallery is received in a different way from a photograph printed alongside a report in a newspaper.

In either case, the wish is to communicate a particular vision of reality, but the methods for achieving the clearest communication possible can be misunderstood.

For any photographer, those methods may include staging and post-processing, which are not meant to deceive, but to aid communication. Although artists are generally given more freedom, even they can get into trouble, especially if the manipulation is not immediately obvious as part of the work or revealed up front.

The question of manipulating photographs continues to cause debates because we rely, perhaps naively, on their indexical properties. We have a by now quaint expectation for photographs to reproduce reality in a way that we would never expect of other media.

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One subject that particularly highlights our expectations of photography and blurs the distinction between the artistic and the journalistic photograph is architecture something perceived to have a degree of permanence. Often a viewer’s immediate questions are about the subject, not about the photographer’s techniques in capturing it or the conditions by which the photographer found herself in proximity to it. When not in an art-photography context, a certain degree of documentary “truth” is afforded to the photograph that is not assumed for any other medium, all in spite of our knowledge of the many ways photographs can be manipulated.

Replacing reality The simultaneous power of the author over the photographic image and the photograph’s unique relationship to reality is particularly intriguing for architecture. When photography became widely available, the field of architecture already had an established method of representing buildings through drawings

Overlay of photographs to reveal difference performed by the author: top left: Le Corbusier, original photograph (Fondation Le Corbusier, L1-2-55) top right: Retouched image published in Almanach d’architecture moderne, 1926, p 154, and in Oeuvre complete, I, p 102.

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Overlay of photographs to reveal difference performed by the author. top left: Villa Schwob, Unidentified photographer, original photograph top right: Retouched image published in L’Esprit Nouveau, n. 6 p 683.

and paintings, and many of these representational techniques carried over into architectural photography. In the realm of photography, once the veil of pure reproduction was lifted, it was easy to recognize the photograph’s true identity: an image like any other, an image subject to all the powers of the author, an image invested with that much more power for being closely associated with objectivity.

This was important to the dissemination of Modern Architecture the published image of a building soon overtook the building itself, and the notion of ‘designing for the image’ was born. It no longer mattered how the building aged, what its actual context was, who used it, or how it was used. All that mattered was the iconic shot, the single image.

Photographic manipulation is often seen as a deception but in fact editing, in all its manifestations, just exposes photography’s purported realism to be hollow.

By recognizing photography as an indexical but inherently manipulable medium for transmitting ideas, as index-based with additional encoded information, its status shifts from fact to evidence. The photographer then has a voice and is participating in the shaping of a certain type of truth. The photographic image lives parallel to reality, but cannot replace it. While it may never shake its reputation for indexicality, a photograph, whether or not it was manipulated, and no matter the subject or context, should be understood to project into reality, to present one vision of the present and preserve it through time.

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