University of Lille, France Possibly 1989 - 2006

This is a photograph taken by Lewis Baltz at the University of Lille in France. It’s cool how it deals with such a small range of color - like, almost grayscale - except for that little bit of blue, which just sings. I bet Baltz was thinking about how spaces shape us, and how we move through them. I wonder if he felt a bit like an intruder, documenting a place not really meant for lingering. What do you think it’s like to be in that server room? All right angles and cold surfaces. The lighting is so flat. It’s not romantic, that’s for sure. Baltz is great. He was trying to make sense of late capitalism with his camera, I guess? He must have been a fly on the wall, buzzing around to find these strange, dehumanized places. But the weirdness is what makes it sing. It's like he's saying, "Hey, look at this! Isn't it strange that we built this?" And yeah, it is pretty strange.