Sabine Bitter / Helmut Weber

Collaboration Since 1993—Sharing a Research Process Larger Than the Shoot

Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber have worked collaboratively since 1993, with Vienna and Vancouver as their principal bases. Fotogalerie Wien situates their work as an ongoing examination of the social transformations from modernity to neoliberal globalism through architecture, urban development, and urban theory^*1. Collaborative research documented by Simon Fraser University includes fieldwork, archival research, the development of performances and video, and publishing, all proceeding through mutual review^*20. The Kontakt Collection likewise describes their work as bringing historical architectural photographs, texts, and video together to compare the forms of life imagined by modernism with contemporary urban experience^*21. Their collaboration is therefore organized around a research process larger than the act of taking photographs. Moving together among archives, theory, fieldwork, and exhibition design has become their method for turning long-term urban research into art.

From Bernd and Hilla Becher to Sekula and Rosler—Architectural Photography After the Critique of Documentary

Among the major postwar precedents for repeatedly documenting architecture under controlled conditions are Bernd and Hilla Becher, who from the late 1950s systematically photographed industrial structures such as water towers and blast furnaces, building typologies that made their forms comparable^*18. In the 1970s, however, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and others argued that the testimonial force of documentary photography does not arise automatically from the photograph itself; texts, institutions, economics, and circulation also shape what a photograph can mean. MACBA’s Universal Archive describes this period as a major reassessment of the assumptions underlying urban and social documentary^*19. From the 1990s onward, Bitter and Weber brought these two legacies together around architecture. They compare more than the formal appearance of buildings: existing photographs, text, video, and exhibition design show how the same building acquires different meanings through magazines, planning documents, political movements, and everyday use. Architectural photography consequently becomes evidence for testing where modernist ideals and lived reality diverged.

Making “Architecture Only” and “People Only” from the Same Photograph—Taking the Image Apart

Fotogalerie Wien describes photography in their work as a field in which the conventions and ideologies of images can be analyzed^*1. Photography serves as both a research tool and an object of research. Before modern buildings were completed, models, plans, and magazines already presented them to the public as images of rational, new forms of life. The Kontakt Collection notes that Bitter and Weber combine reproductions of historical and architectural images with text to examine the “image politics” surrounding culturally significant spaces^*21. In Super Students #1, they took a photograph of a 1967 student protest at Simon Fraser University and produced one version in which the architecture was removed, leaving only the crowd, and another in which the people were removed, leaving only the building^*2. Splitting the source photograph into two incomplete images reveals how “the history of university architecture” and “the history of student protest” can be separated into different historical narratives. Their need for photography lies in something that a new photograph of the building alone cannot provide: the ability to return images that once legitimated modernism to the same field as the later social and political life that unfolded there.

Henri Lefebvre—Space Is Socially Produced, Not an Empty Container

Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space provides a documented intellectual reference for this method. CONTACT Photography Festival’s account of Super Students #1 notes the artists’ engagement with Lefebvre and his understanding of space as something produced through social action, rather than as a neutral physical container^*2. The work takes an archival photograph of a 1967 student protest at Simon Fraser University and makes two versions: one removes the architecture and leaves the crowd; the other removes the people and leaves the architecture. What is removed matters as much as what is shown. The paired images expose the difference between reading the university as an example of modernist form and reading it as a site where political action took place.

LIVE LIKE THIS!—Reading Modernist Housing as Lived Space

LIVE LIKE THIS! reexamines images of modern housing and apartment complexes across the idealized forms promoted in architectural magazines, residents’ lives, and changing political and economic conditions. Camera Austria presents the project as an inquiry into how modernist housing and urban planning were represented and how those representations met social reality^*7. The version of the project published in Cabinet likewise brings habitation, modernization, and image circulation into the same structure instead of treating architecture as an autonomous formal object^*13. Photography is necessary here because it can move between the building itself and the idealized images through which architecture circulated in advertising, magazines, and exhibitions. Combining new photographs with reused images makes the gap between an actual building and the image people have been taught to associate with it into the substance of the work.

Urban Subjects—Collaborative Research Across Photography, Urban Policy, and Publishing

In 2004, Bitter and Weber formed Urban Subjects with poet and critic Jeff Derksen. SFU’s profile records how their collaborative research into urban transformation through photography and spatial installation extended into teaching and publishing^*4. In an extended SFU interview, the group describes treating the city through architecture together with policy, economics, culture, and everyday life^*11. This collaboration opens urban research beyond the perspective of the photographer alone, bringing researchers, residents, students, and critics into the process. Its main function is practical: to enlarge the range of inquiry, rather than simply blur individual authorship.

Super Students #1—Erasing an Archival Photograph to Reread Public Space

Super Students #1 uses erasure within an existing photograph to show how a single event can be divided into “architectural history” and “the history of student protest.” CONTACT’s page reproduces the work, making visible the structure in which architecture and crowd are separated into different versions^*2. The Power Plant also describes the project as a reordering of histories of public space, education, and dissent^*3. In Clockshop’s Supercitizen (AMERICA), photography and public programming examine how ideas of publicity and citizenship take form within urban imagery^*8. Rather than presenting a photograph as self-contained evidence, Bitter and Weber carry its histories and conditions of use into a new exhibition situation.

Educational Modernism—University Architecture, Education, and Colonialism in the Same Field

In the more recent Educational Modernism, university campuses are considered through the ideals of higher education, student movements, and institutions of land and knowledge, as well as the formal language of modernist architecture. e-flux describes Encounter Educational Modernism as a project that reexamines the history of educational institutions and modernist architecture from contemporary political conditions^*6. At SFU, Unsettling Educational Modernism organized Guests & Hosts with Indigenous students, faculty, and others, addressing the university as an institution within settler colonialism and questioning Western-centered concepts of education^*23. The project develops the visual history of the campus through archives, exhibition, and publication^*9. A Monument Beyond Itself asks how monumental architecture contains social relations and histories beyond its own form^*10. SAAG’s Performing Educational Modernism publishes installation views that show photography integrated with walls, three-dimensional structures, and text^*15.

Comparing Photographs, Plans, Video, and Text on the Same Exhibition Surface

For the MAK Center’s Garage Exchange, research on the urban environment of Los Angeles developed into photography and an architectural exhibition structure^*5. Another MAK Center project presented Urban Oil, which addressed urban infrastructure and the petroleum economy, extending their field of inquiry from housing and campuses to the resource systems that move the city^*12. Their exhibitions are arranged so that materials from different periods and with different uses can be compared in one place: historical photographs enlarged to wall scale, altered and unaltered versions of the same image placed together, plans and quotations set beside photographs, and moving images presented along the same viewing route as still photographs. A text on the BUWOG architectural project similarly notes how photographs enter the actual facade, making the relation between architecture and its photographic image visible^*22. Such arrangements make it possible to compare the architectural image promised by completion photography, the history that later took place there, and the building’s present use at the same time. Exhibition design functions as a method for bringing materials from different periods onto a single surface of inquiry.

Re-editing Architectural Photography as Historical Evidence—from Finished Image to History of Use

HKW’s archive places Bitter and Weber within an international field of research-based art concerned with the politics of cities and space^*14. Their defining move is not simply to photograph architecture precisely, but to return existing architectural photographs, planning material, and records of residents and student movements to the same exhibition so that the social image promised when a modern building was introduced can be compared with what later happened there. Bernd and Hilla Becher pursued formal comparison across typological photographs of buildings; Bitter and Weber bring images of the same building from different periods and uses into collision. Their work gives a specifically architectural and urban form to the critique of documentary associated with Sekula and Rosler.

From Megastructures to Educational Institutions—A Sustained Reexamination of Modernism

Living Megastructures, presented by SAIC in 2005, offers an early example of their effort to reread large-scale modern architecture through habitation, moving images, and social institutions^*17. Secession’s publication project for Encounter Educational Modernism shows the same line of inquiry continuing later through universities and educational institutions^*16. Across more than three decades of collaboration, they have avoided reducing modern architecture to a verdict of success or failure. Instead, they trace the social forms architecture promised and the ways those promises were recorded and remembered through photographs and publications. Photography is both historical evidence for that inquiry and one of the mechanisms through which modern architecture acquired value in the first place.