Jennifer King on Iwan Baan – Artforum International
Just who is the “we” in the title of Iwan Baan’s recent exhibition “The Way We Live”? I ask because, while the Dutch photographer’s stated intent is to frame our built environment as a thoroughly shared condition, his images of buildings (and, by extension, the people who interact with them), which document extreme ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, do not lend themselves to notions of collectivity. If there is, in fact, a shared experience indicated by Baan’s title, it’s only that the people in his photographs, and we as viewers, all live in a world of architecture under capitalism.