Phoenix, 40th Street and South of Broadway, Looking Southwest 1998

This photograph was taken by Allen Dutton, sometime in the twentieth century. It’s called ‘Phoenix, 40th Street and South of Broadway, Looking Southwest’. The greyscale image captures a cityscape being built, or perhaps deconstructed. The trunks of felled trees dominate the foreground, arranged with a rhythmic sensibility. Each band of bark, and every mark in the earth, is sharply defined. Further back, a forest of bare, upright trunks stands erect. These marks form a web of lines, creating layers of depth and texture. There is a tension between the harsh light and the image’s flat affect, its muted tones and the scene’s dramatic character. It puts me in mind of the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who documented industrial landscapes and architectural forms with a similarly rigorous attention to detail. Like the Bechers, Dutton’s photograph invites us to contemplate the relationship between nature and industry, permanence and change. It reminds us that art is a constant dialogue between observation, documentation, and interpretation.