H The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time

This thought-provoking book, like the photographs it features, invites multiple readings. Its images inform each other and make a powerful argument for the power of the building and the photograph to uniquely preserve memory, to preserve even time. “Civilization grows around the building like coral around an island. A new-laid foundation expresses hope…an abandoned building signifies a surrender,” writes Smith, photography curator at the Princeton University Art Museum and author of Edward Steichen. Like Steichen’s photographs, these photos show actors in various stages of undress, unlike him, the “actors” are buildings in various stages of growth, decay, evolution. “Whether pyramid or gas station, a building, in its immobility, imbues its locale with accumulated years, connecting the present to its moment of origin.” Smith writes with poetic precision and his carefully selected images are both a world tour and a survey of photographic masters from Antonio Beato to Sze Tsung Leong. Like Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, the book’s title is a bit of a fake out. Even if “nothing sets the scene for redemption like the right kind of ruin” these photographs ensure that a building, like a city, never truly dies. (Sept.)