Frank van der Salm

From Painting to Photography: Constructing a “Fiction of Reality” on a Flat Surface

Frank van der Salm initially wanted to become a painter and used photographs as source material for paintings. He has recalled that he could not realize the finished image he imagined through painting; while trying to improve his reference photographs, he gradually moved toward photography itself. From the painter Klaas Gubbels, he says, he learned to see the tension of a single line and the space that remains around it.^*2 Once he turned to photography, his central question became what happens when three-dimensional reality is converted into a flat image. His student thesis was titled “The Fiction of Reality.” Architecture and the city, whose three-dimensionality is especially explicit, became a way to test photography’s opposing condition of flatness.^*2

After New Topographics: Changing Technique from Place to Place

His official biography states that his early work began under the influence of New Topographics. From there, his subjects expanded from human-altered landscapes to contemporary cities shaped by globalization, political and economic pressures, and an increasing density of images.^*1 A Leiden University study of Dutch landscape photography discusses van der Salm as one of the photographers who, from the 1990s onward, addressed a national landscape extensively shaped by human intervention.^*3 Van der Salm treats those formal choices as variables. Unlike some German contemporaries who worked with deep focus, horizontal framing, and uniform formats, he argues that photographic technique should change with the site and situation.^*2 Studies of Wout Berger’s teaching describe how he introduced younger Dutch photographers to large-format cameras and a distanced way of observing landscape. Van der Salm began working within that educational environment.^*4

From Explaining Architecture to Making Photographs with Architecture

Architectural photography in the Netherlands has long served an institutional role: documenting completed buildings in an ideal state and helping shape the reception of architects and styles through magazines and publications. Nieuwe Instituut’s collection history describes architectural photographs as surrogates for buildings and as a medium for communicating architects’ intentions to the public.^*13 Van der Salm works with this tradition in mind while using architecture as material for the photograph itself. He has said that, in the end, the photographic image matters more to him than the architecture.^*2 Writing on Spot and related works, Urs Stahel similarly distinguishes van der Salm from conventional architectural photographers, describing an artist who uses architecture as material for constructing photographs.^*5 Nieuwe Instituut’s invitation to place him in dialogue with architects also reflects a career situated between commissioned architectural photography and autonomous artistic work.^*12

Blur, Tilt/Shift, and Artificial Light: Turning Three Dimensions into a Model

Van der Salm photographs real places that can resemble architectural models, advertising renderings, or enormous stage sets. An essay in ReVue analyzes how, in Spot, the plane of focus and camera movements turn a deep architectural space into something closer to flat fields of color.^*5 In the Rijksmuseum’s Tour, Paris is photographed from a high vantage point in 2002. Focus, exposure, and framing turn the changing experience of time and distance brought by the HSL high-speed rail connection into a tension between recognizable reality and abstraction.^*6 Large urban views such as the ING Collection’s Panorama likewise use light and scale to turn the city into a self-contained image, giving viewers fewer clues for identifying or explaining the site.^*7 A 2005 feature in TANK presented van der Salm’s photographs as images of real cities that nonetheless resemble models.^*14

People Without Individual Identities: Recording an Era More Than a Place

Although van der Salm photographs cities, individual faces and personal narratives rarely occupy the center of his images. He has explained that by withholding people as identifiable individuals, he wants the viewer to become the only specific person present in the scene.^*2 The Leiden University study notes that slightly displaced focus and generic titles such as Square and Network reduce information about a specific city and bring urban types and structures to the foreground.^*3 A text by Maxine Kopsa for an exhibition at Akinci likewise examines the overlap between a specific place and a city that could be anywhere, and between reality and illusion.^*17 This anonymity corresponds to van der Salm’s remark that, if his work is documentary at all, he would prefer to call it a document of an era rather than of a place.^*1

Tour, 2002: Blurring the Time and Distance Compressed by High-Speed Rail

Tour makes van der Salm’s departure from a New Topographics-style description of terrain especially clear. The Rijksmuseum places the work against the changing sense of distance between Paris and the Netherlands after the opening of the HSL, describing how city lights photographed from the Montparnasse Tower become small points when the image is thrown out of focus.^*6 The photograph withholds detailed urban information and translates the speed introduced by transportation into an image in which individual elements are difficult to identify.In Tour, the altered sense of distance created by travel and the temporality suggested by nighttime lights take precedence over a precise reading of urban detail.^*6

Forum, 2004–05: Turning an Architectural Commission into an Autonomous Work

Van der Salm’s collaborations with architects also produce images intended to stand independently of conventional completion photography. Commissioned by Herzog & de Meuron, his Forum project in Barcelona was exhibited in 2004–05 in both architectural and photographic settings; his website preserves the series and its exhibition history.^*18 He has said that even when working on commission for architects, he maintains the independence of his own work and makes images that do not serve the conventional architectural task of explaining design, structure, or function.^*2 As Nieuwe Instituut’s collection history shows, architectural photography has long functioned as a surrogate through which buildings circulate socially^*13. In van der Salm’s Forum, the commission centers on how architecture appears on the photographic plane; structural explanation remains secondary.^*12

NOWHERE: Twenty-Five Years of Cities Recast as a City of Nowhere

Published in 2021, NOWHERE – Imagining The Global City assembles roughly twenty-five years of work from fragments of different cities and edits them into something resembling a single fictional metropolis. Paradox describes a sequence that joins images made in different cities, sometimes turning them upside down, so that a fictional metropolis of consumer society emerges as a place that is “everywhere and nowhere.”^*8 Hartmann Books likewise frames the publication around the homogenization of architecture, design, and urban landscapes through international corporate activity and image circulation, including the repetition of cities designed to appear “Instagrammable.”^*10 The Rijksmuseum catalogs the book as a 360-page publication and notes that its images, including pages printed upside down, are arranged to answer and question one another, together forming a fictional city that is “everywhere and nowhere.”^*11 The Guardian also presented the exhibition with photographs, describing it as a survey of twenty-five years of urban dreams and emptiness.^*15

241 Images, 41 Words: Using AI to Reveal Latent Connections Across the Work

For the NOWHERE exhibition, an eighteen-meter-wide video wall used AI to reorder earlier works. According to Paradox, 241 photographs were associated with forty-one terms, including “24/7” and “alienation”; numerical data describing the relationship between images and words was used to build the display system in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam and others.^*9 The AI did not generate new urban images. It removed a quarter century of photographs from their fixed series order and recombined them in real time according to the proximity between images and words.^*9 The project as a whole combined the photobook, physical prints, the AI video wall, and public programming.^*8

“Beauty with a Problem”: Resisting a Fixed Verdict on the City

Van der Salm’s photographs address the homogenization of global cities and the force of capital while withholding the clear verdict of an accusatory image. He describes the attraction of his work as “beauty with a problem,” using aesthetic appeal as an entry point into the urban image.^*1 In an interview with B scene, he similarly argues that his photographs should leave viewers room to form their own judgments, operating on different terms from commercial advertising or real-estate imagery.^*2 Writing on van der Salm, Dirk van Weelden argues that urban life is shaped as strongly by the images a city produces to promote its own growth as by concrete, glass, and traffic. He frames the work around the question of how such images can be distinguished and viewed more freely.^*26 Van der Salm does not remove beauty from the image. He retains a visual pull comparable to that of advertising and renderings that market the city, while leaving viewers room to judge what those images conceal and what they make appear real. Kopsa’s criticism likewise avoids reducing the work to an anti-urban moral judgment, reading artificial light, distance, and ambiguous location as sources of both attraction and unease.^*17 ROOF—A’s 2022 exhibition NOW+HERE continued the concerns of NOWHERE by bringing actual and imagined cities into overlap.^*16

From Venice to Beijing: Comparing the Global City Through International Exhibitions

In 2001, van der Salm participated in Post Nature, the Dutch Pavilion presentation at the 49th Venice Biennale, placing his work on cities and constructed environments within an international art setting.^*19 In 2008, a solo exhibition at the Fries Museum and the book Multiplicity presented his urban work in a more comprehensive form.^*20 His subjects later expanded to Asian economic centers, and in 2025 a large solo exhibition at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing reconfigured NOWHERE. The official record lists twenty-six prints, two works made on site, and the AI video wall.^*22 A China Daily review notes that the shallow depth of field in works such as Site makes real architecture resemble a developer’s model, linking new cities in different parts of the world through similar images of the future.^*21

Shore, Aarsman, and Zwakman: Ways of Photographing the Built Landscape

The 1975 exhibition New Topographics redirected attention from grand natural scenery toward industrial zones, suburbs, roads, and ordinary built landscapes. SFMOMA describes it as an event that brought a major change of direction to postwar landscape photography.^*23 In the Netherlands from the 1980s onward, photographers including Wout Berger, Jannes Linders, and Hans Aarsman used large-format cameras and elevated viewpoints to photograph constructed landscapes outside the conventions of dramatic scenery or social reportage. The Leiden University study places van der Salm after this development and notes how slight blur and generic titles such as Square and Network suppress details of specific locations and foreground urban types.^*3 The same study identifies his contemporary Edwin Zwakman as a useful comparison because of a shared interest in the “generalized contemporary landscape.” Zwakman builds models and photographs them as if they were real; van der Salm photographs real cities and makes them appear model-like.^*3

The apparent disappearance of people from the city contributes to this generalization. Architecture and design critic Aaron Betsky has emphasized van der Salm’s tendency to photograph new Asian cities, Western business districts, airports, subways, and hotels at a similarly impersonal scale.^*24 In his text for NOWHERE, Shumon Basar likewise draws attention to the near absence of human figures from images of urban landscapes and “super modernity.”^*25 These empty cities do not primarily function as settings for an apocalyptic narrative. They provide a form through which to ask how much local specificity remains when similar architecture, transportation, advertising, and light recur across the world.

From New Topographics to the “City Made of Images”

New Topographics provided a clear starting point for van der Salm’s observation of built landscapes. He treated its visual conventions as variables, using blur, color, nighttime views, large prints, architectural commissions, photobooks, and AI-based installations according to the demands of each project. Among photographers associated with the Bechers, he has said he feels closest to Andreas Gursky, particularly his early work; both share a distanced observation of the city and an interest in constructing the photograph as a self-contained image.^*2 A recurring concern in van der Salm’s work is the way a three-dimensional city is already experienced as an image—through advertising, renderings, smartphones, and architectural photography—before one arrives there. His official statement places at the center of the work a contradiction: the photographer who examines a society made of images inevitably adds new images to that same society.^*1 The gaze that initially examined buildings and infrastructure in constructed landscapes later turned toward the circulation of urban images themselves, extending to renderings, advertising, smartphones, and AI.