Untitled (Cobble Constellation), 2011

This photograph, of loose cobblestones scattered atop a gridded bed of similar pieces, is from Barney Kulok’s book Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island, published by Aperture in 2012. In the fall of 2011, Kulok was granted special permission to create photographs at the construction site of the Kahn’s Four Freedoms Park, commissioned in 1970 as a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The last design Kahn completed before his untimely death in 1974, the park became widely regarded as one of the great unbuilt masterpieces of twentieth-century architecture. Kulok’s black-and-white photographs translate the austere geometry and muscular presence of Kahn’s designs, yet, as this photograph demonstrates, also function as a lyrical meditation on Minimal and Post-Minimal art.

In this work, moody grays demonstrate Kulok’s remarkable control of tonal range, and the series as a whole functions as a statement about the value of carefully measured photographic seeing at a time when the instant digital photo has become the common currency of the medium. Here form and texture merge. As architect Steven Holl writes, “Kulok’s photographs free the subject matter from a literal interpretation of the site. They stand as ‘Equivalents’ to the words about material, light, and shadow that Louis Kahn often spoke.”

Gelatin-Silver Print
Image Size: 8 3/4 x 12 inches
Paper Size: 11 x 14 inches
Edition of 25 + 3 AP
Signed and numbered by the artist

Barney Kulok (b. 1981, New York City) is a photographer and artist living in New York City. He received his BA in Photography from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, in 2004. Kulok’s work is held in various public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College; and The Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio. A recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s MCAF Grant, he has lectured at the New York Institute for the Humanities (New York University); Sarah Lawrence College; Harvard University; The University of Texas at Austin; and the School of Visual Arts. Among various books, Kulok published his monograph, Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island, with Aperture in 2012, and contributed writing to The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014). Barney Kulok is represented by Galerie Hussenot in Paris.