Hong Kong 06 2002 / 2008

The Jungle of Cities

H.G. Esch has worked successfully as an architectural photographer for the major offices that effectively design today's urban space and that of the future. His passion for his work often makes him forget the boundaries between commissioned and freelance jobs.

Spaces pile up in the air and H.G. Esch's architecture photographs present where narrow megacities become even narrower in a highly aesthetic, image-filling density. Esch learned the craft classically; the buildings and cities that he documents reads like a list of powerful economic centers of the globe. Supplementing and complementing his work are the images of the gigantic housing blocks of those who keep these economic and production machines going.

H.G. Esch meticulously observes the changing of light at the Chrysler Building in New York, one of the historic landmarks of the emerging United States and its early economic success. The elegant crown of the office tower in the style of American Art Déco changes from deep brown, to rapturous violet to bright blue. It seems to be like a barometer of the mood change in nearby Wall Street, a place that has shaped the whole world since the thirties at the latest.

But the faces of the numerous other and new mega-cities are in unremitting change – the next building boom will bring with it new architectural fashions again summoning H.G. Esch to document them in classical perfection.

Horst Klöver