The invitation was to look again. Not to document, but to attend. To make photographs that could sit within the practice’s proposition at the Biennale Architettura 2014, that architecture is not singular, but layered; not authored once, but continuously rewritten.
Around the same time, I received a diagnosis. Cancer, delivered with the peculiar calm of medical language. A future suddenly divided into before and after. The operation was scheduled eight weeks ahead. A fixed point. So the work unfolded inside that interval.
It is tempting, in retrospect, to assign significance too neatly, to suggest that the photographs became sharper, more urgent, more attuned. That would be a kind of vanity. The buildings did not change because of my condition. Nor did the light fall differently. But something did shift, somewhere in my heart.
I chose not to speak about the diagnosis during those weeks. Not out of denial, nor stoicism, but because the work required a certain continuity of relation. These were buildings made by friends, by collaborators of long standing. To introduce another narrative, to allow the work to be read through the lens of illness, would have altered that equilibrium. It would have risked turning the photographs into something else.
There is a particular quality to photographing buildings you have known over time. They resist the impulse toward novelty. One is not discovering them, but re-encountering them. The task becomes one of careful observation: how to acknowledge what is already understood, while remaining open to what has shifted, subtly, materially, socially, since the last encounter. To remain attentive to the history before you.
The operation took place as the show was opening. While others gathered in Venice, I was elsewhere, under anaesthetic, the body subjected to its own form of intervention and reconstruction. It is not a comparison I would labour, but the parallel was not entirely lost on me: architecture and medicine both engaged in acts of removal, repair, and continuation.
The outcome was, mercifully, straightforward. The tumour removed, recovery uneventful, life resuming its previous course with minimal outward sign of interruption. The photographs, meanwhile, entered the exhibition as if nothing had occurred. They did their work without annotation, without the need of extra layers of history and narrative.
Looking back, what remains is not a sense of drama, but of concentration. A period in which the usual distractions fell away, and the act of making, of standing in front of something and giving it time, became sufficient in itself.
To photograph for old friends, in those circumstances, was to be reminded that architecture, like life, is rarely about singular moments of authorship or crisis. It is about continuities, of thought, of care, of attention, carried forward across time, often without announcement.
