Olivier Christinat - "Figurations II" (2016) (it's people coming down on an elevator)
'Civilization' is a broad theme for an exhibition, and maybe especially one of contemporary photography, but this show was convincing, helped by the thematic organisation which struck the balance between being meaningfully specific and sufficiently rich in association: 'flow', 'hive', 'rupture' etc. The pieces leaned towards the evidently composed, and many used repetition as part of their effect. These two, Candida Hofer's "Augustiner Chorherrenstift Sankt Florian III 2014" (2014) and Ahmad Zamroni's "Muslims pray at a mosque during the Friday noon prayer in Jakarta" (2007), struck me as a matched pair:
Others:
Thomas Struth - "Pergamon Museum 1, Berlin 2001" (2001)
Graham Miller - "Alice" (2005)
Taloi Havini and Stuart Miller - "Sami and the Panguna mine" (2009) - PNG conflict and copper mining
Michael Wolf - "Tokyo Compression #80" (2010)
Irene Kung - "Torre Velasca" (2010), though I liked her "IAC Gehry NY" from the same The Invisible City series even more
Also Richard Misrach's "Untitled (November 9, 2013, 9:49am)" (2013) from his On the Beach series.
