2006 Portfolio Prize Runner Up: Michael Fisher
Suite, The Plaza Hotel, New York City, 2005
Since 1907, the Plaza Hotel has served as a reliable icon of the city’s opulence and fabulousness. As one of New York’s star pieces of architecture, it made its first film cameo in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. and Likewise, photographs typically glorify its stately presence as New York’s French renaissance-style château presiding over the southern border of Central Park. Elliot Erwitt photographed Truman Capote’s storied Black-and-White Ball in its Grand Ballroom in 1966. But New York’s ever-ravenous real estate market leaves little room for nostalgic longing; in 200–5, a few years shy of its centennial, the property was sold for a staggering sum and partly converted into luxury condos.
As a photographer, Michael Fisher was already interested in “neglected space” when he arrived at the Plaza in 2005 to drop off a package for his boss, photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was there on assignment. There he found an unexpected scene: “the Grand Ballroom was turned into a massive checkout with cashiers ringing up the details of hotel life.” The post-sale gutting of its interior and subsequent liquidation sale where its contents were sold like bric-a-brac at a flea market seemed out of place. Intrigued, Fisher researched the history of the hotel and made repeated visits, during which he sought out specific rooms, such as those where Elizabeth Taylor spent her honeymoon with Richard Burton. (The Plaza’s façade has landmark status and a few famed interior spaces will survive the building’s transformation into part hotel/part luxury condos.)
Fisher’s straightforward photographs are devoid of glamour; instead we find in them only detritus, traces, markings, and stained walls. Light entering through the curtain of a now-empty room and a strangely lit chandelier evoke the feel of a haunted house, a torn lampshade rests on a rough concrete floor like evidence at the scene of a crime. One imagines the disgruntled ghosts of Capote’s ball haunting the Plaza as it undergoes this transformation, one brought about by an unyielding market that squeezes cash from concrete.
All photographs from the series The Plaza Hotel. Courtesy the artist.
A scholarship recipient to The School of Visual Arts, New York, Michael Fisher graduated in 1997. For the last thirteen years he has worked for Annie Leibovitz’s, as her archivist.
