Presentation: “Anonymization” by Robert Harding Pittman

On 13 December at 7 p.m. Ivorypress hosted a roundtable discussion in which Anonymization, the first publication of photographer Robert Harding Pittman, will be launched. This book forces us to reflect upon the current model of unbridled urban planning which has inflicted a painful metamorphosis on the territories photographed by Pittman.

Along with the author, other participants in the debate will be Luis Felipe Alonso Texidor, architect, National Urban Planning Award winner in 1985 and professor at the ETSAM in Madrid, as well as ecologist Pedro Costa Morata, sociologist and professor at the Universidad Politécnica in Madrid.

Pittman’s critique is centred around the urban sprawl phenomenon, which in cities like Los Angeles has been characterised by large highways, parking garages, shopping malls and large-scale residential areas. According to the author, these types of anonymous urban planning projects which lack personality, are extending throughout the world’s topography with no regard for local context or the necessary sustainability. The book Anonymization, published by Kehrer, has been nominated for the German Photobook Award. The book includes four texts, written by Alison Nordström, curator of the George Eastman House, ecologist Bill McKibben, architect Galina Tachieva and sociologist Anette Baldauf. Pittman’s images, ‘many of them haunting in an arid way, remind us by contrast of how much we long for real places, real texture, real homes, real communities’, described Bill McKibben. ‘In many cases they’re the face of the housing bust, but also of some much deeper bust, in the way we’ve been thinking (or not) about the world’, remarks this American ecologist.

Robert Harding Pittman grew up between Boston and Hamburg. After obtaining a Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering (U.C. Berkeley), an area of interest that is still present in his work, he carried out an MFA in Photography, Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). His work centres on the interaction and new relationships of human beings with their surroundings: culture, environment and landscape. Anonymization is the result of ten years of work on this theme. His photographs and documentaries (which have been recognised with several awards) have been shown at film festivals and international exhibitions and are included in many public and private collections.