Spectacular city
12 November

In hindsight, it’s peculiar that I have never tried to get my hands on a copy of this book before. It’s been out of print for years but it never occurred to me to look for it in second-hand bookstores, or perhaps I had just half-forgotten about it. But now that I have a copy on my shelf, I’m more than happy to have it. It’s in a good enough condition, and since it’s a thing from the past, my past, it feels inappropriate to have a brand new one anyway .

I remember the exhibition that the book accompanied, Spectacular City. Photographing the Future (2006), as the one that ignited my interest in photography as a contemporary art form. The photographs by Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Todd Hido, Francesco Jodice, Sze Tsung Leong, Bas Princen, Geert Goiris, Frank van der Salm, Aglaia Konrad and others made a huge impression, but I don’t think I immediately recognised the importance of my encounter with their work. It’s not that they instantly made me pick up a camera and start photographing architecture and cityscapes, that only happened some six years later. And I obviously didn’t buy the catalogue, even though the exhibit was held at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, where I worked, and the book was published by their affiliated publisher. It wouldn’t have been too hard to get myself a copy.

In his essay, Steven Jacobs talks about the way urban landscape photography evolved over time, from street photography and the use of public space, to a focus on the structure of the city itself. 

In the 1970s, the photographers featured in the New Topographics exhibition introduced a new way of photographing landscapes transformed by human activity. They elevated the everyday, anonymous and often overlooked landscape to the status of a serious photographic subject. They created a new aesthetic centred on detachment, observation, and formal analysis.

The photographers of Spectacular City build on these achievements while adding a new dimension. They focus on the contemporary metropolis and its complex spatial structures and patterns, exploring its visual, aesthetic, and sometimes futuristic possibilities, developing new ways of perceiving and representing urbanity. Curator Emiliano Gandolfi even suggests that these photographs could be understood as design proposals for architects and urban planners. Not as concrete building plans, but visual proposals that feed the debate over urban planning.

Six from a recent walk. Rotterdam, November 2026. All Nikon Z6.