Bread and Circuses
From Rome to Las Vegas: Iwan Baan is one of the best contemporary architectural photographers. He captures with his camera what many cannot see with the naked eye - without any deepfake. Spaces take on dimensions in front of his lens; in the Dutchman's photographs they become tangible, take on proportions and enter into relationships. In his recent book printed by Lars Müller Publishers, the photographer tells a story about Rome and Las Vegas.
Baan's photos are always at their best when he works in a reportage format. His narratives are then populated with people who move through the space, take it over, appropriate it and sometimes reinterpret it. This gives rise to sensitive narratives of his own - and it is these stories that ultimately make up architecture and narrate its everyday life.
© Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Lars Müller Publishers
Showcase City
The unusual paperback “Rome - Las Vagas. Bread and Circuses” is published by Lars Müller Publishers and bound with simple staples: a kind of photo portfolio. The volume contains a total of 180 mostly page-filling photographs that Iwan Baan took in Rome in the hot summer of 2022 and before that in Las Vegas. His observations of the two cities have a concrete background: they were taken for an exhibition at the American Academy in Rome, the idea of curator Lindsay Harris was a kind of stocktaking of the status quo on the 50th anniversary of the legendary essay “Learning form Las Vegas” (1972) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izvenour. So what have we learned from Las Vegas?
© Rome, Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Lars Müller Publishers
Everyday live and perspectives
There are two main perspectives that Baan captures with his camera: one in everyday life, from the point of view of the local people. The other is an aerial perspective - it reveals urban contexts. The Trevi Fountain in Rome appears as a distant backdrop behind the crowds of tourists on a hot summer's day in the Italian capital. The copy of Michelangelo's David in front of a golden apse somewhere in Las Vegas acts as a kind of signal for the cash machine located in a niche right next to it. Rome and Las Vegas are sometimes astonishingly similar in the photographs, so similar in fact that sometimes there is hardly any perceptible difference at first glance. the way of life in both cities is really almost indistinguishable, as Ryan Scavnicky says in his essay “Beard and Circuses”: "because both cities are covered in very distracting articulations; there are giant marble structures, wide streeds flooded by beautiful people and loud building working hard to capture your antantion and mark your place in the city".
© Rome, Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Lars Müller Publishers
Context and people
Baan's observations of both cities are cleverly arranged: after an introduction with juxtapositions - Rome on the one hand, Las Vegas on the other - longer photo essays follow, each dedicated to one city or the other. People occupy both cities and populate the urban space. Life and everyday life become comparable in this wonderful photo album, whether at the slot machine in the casino or in front of the fountain at the Pantheon.
© Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Lars Müller Publishers
Visiting Denise
So what has changed since “Learning from Las Vegas”? Has anything changed at all? In his essay “Visiting Denise”, Izzy Kornblatt describes her visit to Denise Scott Brown in Philadelphia. Not much has really changed, says the 92-year-old American architect. The commercial neon lights in Las Vegas of yesteryear have now been replaced by monumental scenographies that culminate in themed spectacles such as the Excalibur Castle or the Luxor Pyramids and many other places around the Las Vegas Strip. If you want to see the original in Rome and the recreated entertainment backdrop in Las Vegas, Iwan Baan's photographs are not easy to follow. The two realities of life in the old and new worlds are too close together, even if their historical backgrounds could not be more different. However, Izzy Kornblatt's trenchant summary is quite different, and it hits the nail on the head: this is actually about an empathetic, serious and non-judgmental method of approaching places. Denise Scott Brown adopted this method in 1972 and introduced it to architecture at the time. And it is precisely this method that lives on today in Iwan Baan's photographs. Sandra Hofmeister
Iwan Baan, Rome Las Vagas. Bread and Circuses, With contributions by Lindsay Harris, Izzy Kornblatt, Ryan Scavnicky, English texts, 17 × 22,7 cm, 320 pages, 180 illustrations, paperback, Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich 2024, ISBN 978-3-03778-753-3
