Frank van der Salm has spent twenty-five years photographing the places where global capital settles into built form. NOWHERE, subtitled Imagining the Global City, is published by Hartmann Books in coproduction with Paradox and gathers that work into a single volume of 240 images across 360 pages. His subjects are the rapidly growing metropolises of Southeast Asia and the Gulf, along with architectural commissions undertaken with firms such as OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, and MVRDV. What recurs is not local character but its erasure: the same antiseptic beauty reproduced wherever money and design standards converge.
The book’s argument is carried as much by its editing as by its individual pictures. Irma Boom designed the volume, and some images are deliberately printed upside down, so that photographs interrogate one another about the reality they claim to describe. Read in sequence, the city that emerges appears everywhere and nowhere at once, present and placeless. Three authors extend the stakes in different directions: Shumon Basar, who calls these images prophetic realism and notes their emptied streets; Urs Stahel, who rejects the label of architecture photography, describing instead photography made with architecture; and Aaron Betsky, who insists the world depicted is our here and now, or soon will be. Two eight-page gatefolds open the pacing at intervals.
Texts by Shumon Basar, Aaron Betsky, and Urs Stahel link Van der Salm’s oeuvre to design, architecture, urban development, art, and photography, giving the pictures a discursive frame. For a collector, the book’s interest lies in the intersection it stages between those fields and in the rigor of its construction: a substantial softcover monograph at 24 by 32 centimeters, made with an established designer and a copublishing partner. The three random cover and bellyband combinations make an ordinary retail copy only partly predictable.
