LAB Report

Over the past year Landscape Architecture Bureau has been involved in the Design Excellence Committee of Washington AIA, the committee that organizes the various awards programs of the chapter. All of the selected jurors are both excellent designers and thoughtful critics, but they don't get to experience the buildings they judge; they see only photographic representations. Some of these are exceptionally beautiful images in themselves, quite apart from their usefulness as representations. This of course brings up the long running discussion of whether architectural awards are for the buildings or for their photographs. These thoughts were brought to mind by our recent discovery of the work of Kim Holtermand.

His day job is as a fingerprint technician in the Crime Scene Unit of the Danish National Police. During his time off though, he is a fine art photographer whose main subject seems to be loneliness and loss; given his day job this isn't surprising. This is expressed, in large part, through stunning images of architecture. Of course, he is far from the only person who has used architecture as a subject for social commentary and visual expression: see the works of Walker Evans, Eugene Atget and Charles Sheeler in the first half of the 20th century and David Plowden, Walter Christenberry, Alexander Apóstol and Josef Schultz more recently. In fact, since buildings surround us all day, every day, most photographers work with it as a subject at one time or another. Very few make images as heartbreaking as Holtermand's though.