"The Transparent City"

Michael Wolf’s exhibit “The Transparent City” is a zoomed-in look into the cubicles and apartments that make up so much of our city. From the vantage point at which the photographs are taken, either looking straight-across or occasionally looking down from a distance, it is almost as if the viewer is a spy into the lives of these nameless people. The zoom lens that Wolf uses flattens out the space in his pieces. He chooses not to have a skyline; and instead his work is focused on the geometry/layout of the buildings, which seem to just pile up on top of one another. Most shots appear to be taken in the evening hours, so that the building structures serve as large frames for the countless lit-up windows. Because of this, the light generally used is artificial, giving the prints a stale, generic vibe. There seems to be attention to the color blue in Wolf’s prints, at least when looking at the buildings themselves, which again, frame the bright, cold, harsher indoor light from inside the windows. The color in Wolf’s work makes me feel very uneasy. It is not warm, it is not inviting.

The subject of his work is entirely my worst nightmare: generic, bored people living their lives in generic, boring cubicles. This exhibit is impersonal because he is photographing countless strangers who all seem to be stuck in the same life. Yet, his work is personal because each individual in his prints is, in fact, unique, even if he/she is living/working in a similar environment as a bunch of other people. This exhibit reminds me of a Beatles’ lyric, “Oh, look at all the lonely people…”. There are simply so many people in our city, and in the world, and so many of them are unsatisfied with their lives. It is probably not the case that everyone in these prints hates theirs lives, but especially in the single, pixilated portraits of people looking concerned, and cupping their face in their hands, etc., the isolation of their expressions, their grief, their feeling of being overworked and tired is just very sad. The vibe of this set of prints is not happy; no one is giggling or smiling. The people in these prints are simply going through the motions in their life, without any loving interaction or relief from the monotony.