Architecture of Authority
There are some places that you never want to see the insides of. These are the places sought out in Architecture of Authority. The photographs capture spaces both notorious and innocuous, from FBI Headquarters to high school corridors and office spaces.
Architecture of Authority is a body of unsettling pictures of architectural spaces that exert power over the individuals within them. From a Montessori preschool to churches, mosques and diverse civic spaces including a Swedish courtroom, the Iraqi National Assembly hall and the United Nations. The images build to ever harsher manifestations of power: an interrogation room at Guantanamo, segregation cells at Abu Ghraib, and finally, a capital punishment death chamber.
The connections among the various architectures are striking. The Santa Barbara Mission confessional and the LAPD robbery homicide interrogation rooms are the same intimate proportions. Both are made to solicit a confession in exchange for some form of redemption.”
Published in 2007 by Aperture Press. With an essay by Harper’s Magazine publisher, John R. MacArthur
