The best architecture is not so much built nowadays as projected in glossy images. New spectacular photographs portray the beauty and potential of urban landscapes, iconic buildings and deserted interiors. The NAI is about to explore this visual realm of lyrical, large-format photographs. Not just the new cities of China, but a perfectly ordinary German street corner scene and a highway intersection come across in these illustrations as a revelation of what mankind has made. Artists and photographers train their cameras on cities, on remarkable buildings, and on neglected corners of the existing environment. They do not just record their subject matter, but manipulate, construct or reconstruct it. In so doing they give us a glimpse of things that may well have escaped our gaze but are latently present in our rapidly changing world. Each of them engages in his or her own way in photographing the future.

With some 100 photographs taken in the last ten years by internationally acclaimed artists such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thoms Ruff and Olivo Barbieri, as well as by leading Dutch practitioners in this field such as Edwin Zwakman, Frank van der Salm and Bas Princen, the NAI unveils a new world. It is the first international survey exhibition of this work.

Metamorphosis
The city has undergone a radical metamorphosis in recent years. It is no longer merely a habitat, but a place of spectacle and consumption. Globalization, as well as technical and economic developments, have drastically and at a breathtaking pace transformed the look of the city. The photographs presented in "Spectacular City" show us that photographers and artists are taking a profound interest in the changing nature of the urban environment. They portray spectacular aspects of our urban scene while taking maximum advantage of both digital and photographic techniques and of atmospheric factors such as light and weather. They reveal the scale and extremity with which the urban landscape has changed and will continue to change.

Photographers
For "Spectacular City," the NAI has gathered the best work by thirty prominent photographers and artists from home and abroad: Olivo Barbieri, Oliver Boberg, Balthasar Burkhard, Vincenzo Castella, Edgar Cleijne, Stéphane Couturier, Thomas Demand, Andreas Gefeller, Geert Goiris, Andreas Gursky, Naoya Hatakeyama, Todd Hido, Dan Holdsworth, Francesco Jodice, Aglaia Konrad, Luisa Lambri, Ine Lamers, Sze Tsung Leong, Armin Linke, Taiji Matsue, Karin Apollonia Müller, Bas Princen, Thomas Ruff, Frank van der Salm, Heidi Specker, Jules Spinatsch, Thomas Struth, Michael Wesely, Edwin Zwakman.

Exhibition
The photographic works to be presented in Gallery 1 are large in format, ranging from one to nine meters in width. They represent the best examples of urban photography from the last ten years. The photographers operate in the spheres of both art and architecture. Their work indicates the influence that photography has on how we see our rapidly changing urban environment. These photographs offer us a new outlook on our (supposedly) familiar cities and they inspire architects and designers to take a new look at their field of work.
"Spectacular City" demonstrates the diversity of subjective interpretations of the contemporary urban reality - a diversity of visions that go far beyond mere documentation. An important starting point for the exhibition is the work of Andreas Gursky. His work transcends photography of the city as a document and uses digital techniques to manipulate and mould his subject matter into a new, personal reality with urban structures as their primary subject. Gursky reveals the potential of impossible photographic angles, and in so doing has influenced the work of many of the other selected photographers.

Perspectives
The exhibition will highlight the varying personal approaches and (in some cases literal) perspectives that one may have on or in the city. They range from the constructed landscapes of Edwin Zwakman, across the expressiveness of urban structures as seen from great height in the work of Naoya Hatakeyama and Edgar Cleijne and the limitations of the human perception of the environment with its inability to take in the totality at a single glance in that of Olivo Barbieri and Frank van der Salm, to the concern for the construction and the form of the city present in the work of Stéphane Couturier and Heidi Specker.