What is #Brutalism without Instagram?
For a decade Brutalist architecture has been wildly popular on the social media platform. Its graphical qualities, frequent dereliction and nostalgic atmosphere tick all the right boxes for Insta addicts. Moreover, Béton Brut looks great at 1080 pixels.
In its wake have come long-form personal projects and a multitude of chunky photobooks. The boom began with the rediscovery of outlandish – and often intimidating – concrete structures throughout former Eastern Bloc countries.
These explorations – including Christopher Herwig’s Soviet Bus Stops (2015), Roman Bezjak’s Socialist Modernism (2011) and Spomenik by Jan Kempenaers (2010) – frequently adopted a similar tone in their use of flat-light colour photography. Frédéric Chaubin’s 2011 tome CCCP, graphically inspired by Soviet propaganda posters, helped to set the macho mood for what followed.
An inevitable re-appreciation of British Brutalism stimulated a cottage industry of gazetteers and reference books, often with monochromatic photographs plus the inevitable muscular typography. This overall butchness reminds us that Brutalist architecture was almost entirely designed by men and has been rediscovered (with a few exceptions) by male photographers.
The masculinity of these contemporary images starkly contrasts with many of the photographs commissioned by architects and publications when the buildings were originally completed. Documentary photographers such as Roger Mayne (at Sheffield’s Park Hill), Tony Ray-Jones (Deptford’s Pepys Estate and Thamesmead) and Sandra Lousada (Robin Hood Gardens) found the humanity within these uncompromising buildings.
Brutalism in Colour provides a different perspective, encouraging us to look beyond the overfamiliar tropes. The vibrant images transform familiar structures into abstract forms reminiscent of Paul Catherall’s colourful screenprints or the graphical paintings of Patrick Caulfield.
Christopher Hope-Fitch says that he is influenced by the saturated cinema of Giallo directors Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Argento’s 1977 masterpiece Suspiria was one of the last Italian Technicolor movies, utilising the same dye transfer process used to print William Eggleston’s similarly unsettling and cinematic photographs. Saturated colour has long been deployed to perturb and discomfit in both movies and stills. Think of Nicolas Roeg’s cinematography for Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and his own Don’t Look Now (1973), or the blackly comedic documentary images of Martin Parr and vividly intimate Cibachrome snapshots by Nan Goldin.
Hope-Fitch doesn’t unnerve in the same way, but he still discombobulates us, rendering the familiar (and often cliché) as peculiar and mysterious. Exaggerating and transforming colours – delivering neon greens, fluorescent yellows, electric blues and delicate candy pinks – dials down the macho and replaces it with something more surprising.
His work invites us to look again at buildings that we might think of as grey and dreary and rediscover their magical fabulousness.