Water Towers

The subtractive test bites in two directions. The method resists it absolutely: take away the frontal view and the towers become perspectives, incomparable; take away the overcast and the shadows make each picture an occasion; take away the constant scale and the grid compares sizes, not forms; take away a person and nothing is lost, because the absence is required. Each condition bears load. But the parts of the body are substitutable by design. Any tower in a grid of nine could be removed or replaced by a tenth of its type and the grid would know the same thing, and the body could hold a hundred towers more or fewer. A typology needs many and no particular one: necessary as a procedure, assembled as an inventory.

Score: 7.6 / 10

What the grids bring into the open can be stated, and it holds. First, that the anonymous engineering of the industrial age has a language of form: a water tower is set by one function, to hold water high, and the grid shows how far form varies within that constraint, by region, decade, material and builder, so that function proves not to determine form. Second, that these buildings, unregarded and already being demolished, were a culture’s vernacular, its anonymous sculptures. Third, a way of seeing: difference shows only under sameness of conditions. These are meanings, not moods, disclosed through the image entirely. Held below 8.0 because the human condition is disclosed only by inference: the labour, the towns and the water drunk lie outside every frame.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Elevation is refused by method. The grey sky, the even light, the deadpan centring and the repetition all work against transport, and that is the point. What height there is comes in two kinds. A single tower, isolated against blank sky and held in the frame like a specimen, can take on an odd monumentality, at once heroic and absurd, the spherical tanks on their stalks almost figures. And the grid read as a whole yields a quiet, cumulative wonder at variety within one plan, the pleasure of the naturalist’s plate. Neither is a sublime, and neither rises often; the cumulative effect is one effect, steady and cool. The figure describes a work that chose calm, not a failure to reach.

Score: 6.6 / 10

The grids build one deep pattern and evoke a few. What they build is the type itself: from particulars that stay wholly particular, this tower in this town, captioned by its place, a form emerges that belongs to none of them, as in Goethe’s search for the primal plant or the natural historian’s plate of specimens. That relation of the one and the many bears load in the grid; it is not alluded to. But a type is a taxonomic order before it is an archetypal one. The water tower acquires no myth of its own, and the deeper patterns, the vessel, the sentinel over the town, the shrine of a secular age, are brought by the viewer and evoked by the isolation, not built. Sander’s portrait typology, whose types are human, does more here.

Score: 6.8 / 10

The inheritance is double: the New Objectivity of Renger-Patzsch, Blossfeldt’s plant forms and Sander’s typology of people on one side, and the industrial photograph of engineering and trade on the other. The field entered, West German photography of the late 1950s, was dominated by Otto Steinert’s subjective photography, expressive and formalist, and the art around it was Informel and abstraction. The departure was to return to the most impersonal document, make it serial, comparative and systematic, and offer it to art as sculpture and as concept. The stake was real: decades of travel and labour, a subject nobody wanted, an art the market and the museum did not then recognise. Held below the gate because much of the turn is a return, to the 1920s, and its claim on conceptual art was shared with Minimalism as it arrived.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. Its knowledge is comparative, and only the grid makes comparison an act of the eye: nine towers under one light at one scale, so that what differs is only form. A single picture, however fine, knows a building; the grid knows a type and its variation. Change any condition of the form, colour, dramatic light, an oblique angle, a figure for scale, and the variable leaks back in and the knowledge goes. The photograph’s claim to have been there guarantees the vernacular: these were built, by someone, somewhere named. The form is the instrument of the knowledge. Held below 9.0 because a little of what is known, the claim to sculpture and the rescue of the disappearing, is carried by title and context more than by what the eye finds.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence over promise, across half a century of reception. The grids have been read as documentary; as conceptual art kin to Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd; as sculpture, the judgement of the Venice Biennale in 1990; as archive and as the founding text of a school; as elegy for the industrial West, as dispassionate science and as deadpan comedy. Those readings have not closed. Return to a grid yields: the differences between towers are fine and many, the rivets, the gallery rail, the shuttering marks in concrete, the patching, and the eye trained by one grid finds more in the next. What holds the axis is that the principle, once grasped, is grasped, and much return is to the discourse on photography and seriality rather than to these towers. The well is wide more than deep.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is European and American photography from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the body is published, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of photographic possibility, the serial typology made the work, the impersonal document made art, photography made to stand with sculpture and conceptual art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: New Topographics (1975) placed the makers beside Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Stephen Shore and helped set the deadpan of American landscape photography; the Düsseldorf school of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and Axel Hütte grew from their teaching; the Golden Lion for sculpture (1990) marked photography’s entry on sculpture’s terms. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to the whole practice and to the teaching, not to the water towers alone.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The grids stand as made, in prints and in the book, and nothing that carried the work is known to be lost. Many of the towers have been demolished, which takes nothing from the work and adds to it as record. Presence: continuous and wide in its field since the 1970s, in the museums of photography and of modern art, and in a book long in circulation; a body that has outlived the industrial landscape it recorded. Fabric: gelatin silver prints, carefully made, are among the most stable of photographic objects. The body was made across decades and the book is thirty-eight years old. The figure is at the lower end of its row, because the widest presence is a field’s, not the world’s.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged as command of large-format black and white photography and of the grid. The making is exact and bears load. The verticals are true across hundreds of pictures; the raised viewpoint keeps the tower undistorted; the light is chosen by waiting for weather, and its evenness gives the full tonal range in brick, steel and concrete; the prints hold detail from the rivet to the sky. Above all the consistency, held across decades, countries and two hands, is itself a feat of craft: grids made from pictures taken years apart read as one session. What holds the axis below the top is that the range is narrow by design, one view, one light, one scale, so that the hand asks less of itself frame by frame than a crowded picture does. The difficulty is sustained more than various.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: a nineteenth-century brick tower with a castellated top and a steel spherical tank on legs. They obey one law, the same frontal view, the same light, the same scale in the frame, the same place in the grid, and the law makes them comparable rather than merely adjacent. The range the law governs is wide: decades of building, several countries, every material and many styles, from historicist ornament to bare concrete engineering. Nothing in the body contradicts it. This is a law that admits a great variety and orders it, not coherence by exclusion. Held below 9.0 because the law is a rule of procedure, not a law discovered in the material, and it governs by repetition more than by inner development: the grids do not grow from one another.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The orders held are several and are held in one structure, though mostly by implication. Engineering and the economy of water, in the tanks and their supports. The civic order, the town’s supply, in a building that stands over the town. Regional and national history, in the variation of type by country and decade. Architecture and style, in the ornament and its loss. Labour, in the riveting and the shuttering, though no worker appears. The landscape, in the margins of the frames, a field or a roofline. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the method excludes: the sacred and the family are absent, and there is no person anywhere in the body, so most of the orders the axis names stay outside the frame. Integrated in the grid, few and impersonal, above its floor.

Score: 6.4 / 10