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Photographer Profile - Chris Mottalini: "People feel the work is too architectural to be art"

By David Schonauer   Tuesday April 14, 2015

The project that put Brooklyn-based photographer Chris Mottalini  on the map was about architecture, but it was not architectural photography in the traditional sense. It would more properly be described as fine-art work. But, says Mottalini, “A lot of people on the art side feel it’s too architectural to be art.”

The images themselves are intimate views of three houses designed by architect Paul Rudolph in his Brutalist style, once considered cutting-edge but now out of fashion. With the houses facing demolition, the Paul Rudolph Foundation had called in Mottalini to make a visual record of them before they were gone. The probing pictures he made were as much about ghosts as buildings. “I was interested in the families who lived in these homes and the feelings of nostalgia these empty and neglected houses evoke,” he says.

One thing the images are not: Ruin porn. “It would be pretty depressing if they were mistaken for that,” says Mottalini, who grew up in Buffalo, NY, and knows what urban decay looks like. It wasn’t his intent, he says, to exploit the disgraced beauty of the Rudolph homes. Rather, he wanted to ask a question: What do we do with iconic buildings that are now unloved?

Asking questions, in one way or another, is what Mottalini has been doing since he asked himself what he wanted to do for a living. While studying journalism at the University of Colorado he took some photography classes, which led to a job at the Loveland Reporter-Herald of Loveland, CO. He decided he didn’t want to be a photojournalist and in 2000 moved to New York, where he worked at restaurants and bars while asking himself what kind of pictures he wanted to make.

Completing a few editorial portrait assignments led Mottalini to a realization: “I figured out that I didn’t like to photograph people,” he says. He started working as an assistant for noted set designer Jeffrey Miller, who became a mentor, and began shooting architecture—all kinds. Then, in 2007—"through a friend of a friend of mine," says Motallini—the Paul Rudolph Foundation became aware of his work and got in touch.

“I knew a little about Rudolph, because he designed a few buildings in Buffalo, but not a lot,” says Mottalini. After shooting the three homes that were to be demolished, however, he became fascinated by the architect and spent the following year photographing 30 or so Rudolph buildings as a personal project.

"I was obsessed," says Mottalini. Afterward, he became obsessed by the idea of publishing his work as a book, and that was a saga of a different sort.

Portraits of Neglect

After six years—much of it spent cold-calling unenthusiastic publishers who couldn't make out what genre the work belonged to—Mottalini says he learned a couple of things about pitching books: First, think strategically and understand who your target audience is. “In this case, it was people who were more into photography than architecture,” he says. He also learned to write concise emails describing the project.

Finally, in 2013, the University of Chicago Press published Mottalini’s monograph, After You Left/They Took It Apart: Demolished Paul Rudolph Homes. The book received high marks from critics: "Mottalini’s images are the antithesis of traditional architectural photographs, which make buildings look as glamorous as possible," wrote the New York Times, while the Los Angeles Times noted that the Mottalini's images "read like portraits of neglect and speak volumes about the way society forgets historically important buildings in favor of the newest thing." The work was later selected for the American Photography 30 annual.

Mottalini has since been working on editorial assignments for Town & Country, Surface, New York, Gourmet and other magazines, including Pin-Up, an architectural title. He’s also been expanding a personal project  about Thailand, where his girlfriend is from. Called “Nightlights/Backstreets,” it focuses on the country’s fluorescent streetlights and the winding alleys of Bangkok. He calls the work an “interpretation of the architecture of the Thai night.”

“I became a little fixated on the lights and their unintentional sculptural shapes, and on how they interact with the landscape and the sky,” he says.

More recently, Mottalini reunited with his old mentor, Jeffrey Miller, to launch a collaborative photographic enterprise, creating a series of narrative-driven still-life stories with titles like “A History of Saffron.”

“It began as a personal project, but then a good friend of mine, the creative director of Town & Country, said, ‘Why don’t you do one of these for us?’” says Miller. “They gave us a very open door creatively—it’s an old-fashioned way of working, really. Chris has got a great sense of composition, and I’m conceptualizing the stories.”

Like the hard-to-categorize project on the Rudolph homes, Mottalini’s new still-life series reflects where he finds inspiration—not necessarily in the photography of others, but in literature and music. “I’m an obsessive reader and music fan,” he says. If you want to label his work, or file it into a particular genre, you might simply call it visual storytelling. Just don’t call in ruin porn.




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