National Building Museum
Jonas Bendiksen’s exhibition, The Places We Live is a powerful collection of photographs and stories of slums in four of the world’s largest cities. Bendiksen explores the lives of families in Nairobi, Kenya, Caracas, Venezuela, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Mumbai, India. Across different continents and cultures, Bendikesen’s art draws attention to common problems of poverty, overcrowding, and poor sanitation. The exhibition is particularly effective at putting a face to urban poverty and drawing the viewer into the stories of those affected by residents of slums around the world. Instead of a gallery of still images in which museum goer’s walk around to view each photograph, the exhibit is like nothing I have ever seen in a gallery. Viewers enter each section of the exhibit and are surrounded by four walls that serve as screens for alternating images that are synchronized with music and narration. The larger than life images projected on all sides make the viewer feel surrounded by the cities featured in the exhibition and immersed in the lives and issues of people profiled by Bendiksen. In addition to the medium in which Bendiksen’s photographs are presented in, the images themselves are spectacular as they employ artistic techniques such as the rule of thirds and depth of field masterfully. While The Places We Live is only a temporary exhibition and is leaving the National Building Museum soon, it is a fantastic art gallery and is worthy of future viewing.
- The Places We Live – Jonas Bendiksen
The second gallery important to Visual Literacy is the Form and Movement exhibition showcasing the photographs of Philip Trager. The Building Museum’s decision to display Trager’s work is appropriate as his art is primarily focused on photographing buildings. Almost all of Trager’s photos are black and white and make use of shadow, line, and movement in a hauntingly beautiful way. It was interesting to learn about the techniques Trager uses to produce his artwork. The exhibit explained the way in which a darkroom can be employed to make the contrast in images softer or more intense in order to enhance the vision of a photograph. My favorite Trager photographs juxtaposed urban and rural buildings all over the world. Trager’s has an incredible ability to take visually engaging photographs in diverse locations from the urban jungle of New York to the rural Southwestern desert of New Mexico. The harsh and jagged lines of buildings of the city contrast with the soft, curved stone of the countryside.
The National Building Museum’s The Places We Live and Form and Movement exhibits were extremely interesting and will be helpful in developing my own work. I am very glad that I had an opportunity to visit.
