Before and after pictures have always fascinated me. An empty lot and a finished house. A bag of Lego bricks and a finished tower.
When I taught at a small college there was always a strawberry and champagne reception on the sloping meadow behind the art museum. New graduates gathered with their families would call you over, “mom, dad, grandma, this is professor X who taught me Y….” As Maya or Judy or Samara yammered on and on, mom and I would lock eyes for a moment and smile at the before and after – we both remembered what she was like at age 18. A lot had happened over the previous four years.
Once you start, you see this stuff everywhere. My garden before and after spring clean up. This story, now down on paper, but not so long ago just scattered notes in piles. When I lived on the 72nd floor of a swanky Toronto high rise I used to thrill (and freak) at peering over the edge of the balcony to track the progress of a construction project next door. I’d double check that my camera’s neck strap was around my neck and that my feet were firmly flatly planted on the balcony and I’d double check that the glass barrier and rail were intact (and then check again) and lean over to focus my camera 78 floors down at the bottom of a big square hole in the ground. Week by week I recorded as earth was moved, rebar was arranged, and concrete was poured and the foundation of a place where people would someday have apartments on the 74th floor (it was slated to be the new tallest building in the city) took shape.
Construction projects provide a lot of grist for this mill. Among my favorites is when you can get a shot of, say, a “before” image of a truck load of bricks — pallet after identical pallet of layer upon identical layer of identical bricks — and then an “after” shot of columns and arches and lintels and vaults that manifest intention, function, and stability.
One might think of warehouse building supply stores like Home Depot as museums displaying an exhibit called “BEFORE: pre-built environment.”
I was recently reminded that the story also plays out in reverse. Over the course of several visits to my doctor, whose office is on the seventh floor in a complex of modern medical buildings in East Baltimore, I witnessed a building coming down. Outside the window a ten or twelve story structure was being disassembled. In December it was already a skeleton – all the guts of the building had been excised leaving just concrete floors and steel columns. Perhaps because of the adjacent buildings it was a hyper-controlled demolition; it seemed to be being done by hand, chipping away floor by floor, breaking concrete, cutting steel, hauling off one truckload after another to some landfill outside of town. I’d love to get a picture of that mountain of rubble for my collection.
Back in the 1980s my friend Cornelia took me on a grand tour around West Berlin. On a Saturday afternoon we were in a boat, perhaps on the Wansee. To the right were guard towers and the wall and to the left were these enormous mountains of debris – Trümmerberge – from when the destroyed city was cleared after the war. Those urban mountains contain the old Berlin you see in photos from the 1920s and 1930s. And the wall and those towers are probably in some new Trümmerberg now and my snapshots are now “before” photos. After can record the undoing as well as the doing.
But why my fascination? Just nostalgia? Susan Sontag wrote about how photographs “freeze” moments and disconnect them from context. A whole world is going on around the frame of the photo; events led up to that moment and a whole world and events follow. Before and after photos are frozen moments too, but they capture something that they don’t show, the transformation of uniform and undifferentiated to complex and functional affordances and vice versa. Stuff becomes thing and thing becomes stuff.
When its human products like buildings, we’d say intention, vision, and energy add order to “stuff” to create “things.”
But that’s just kicking the problem down the road. The humans who supply the vision and intention that directs the energy are themselves just manifestation of the same thing: stunning transformations of stuff into things, energy goes in, order comes out. Though, again, just as often, one thing we order out of disorder gets used to reduce another achievement of order to rubble as happens when we dismantle a building or rain down bombs and missiles on Ukraine or Syria or Berlin.
Innoeduvation 