The Transparent City

The Transparent City gathers Michael Wolf's photographs of Chicago's downtown skyscrapers made after dark, when illuminated interiors turn the glass towers into vast, legible grids of windows.

Working with a large-format camera from the street and from within neighboring buildings, Wolf photographed the city's Loop and near North Side at a resolution fine enough to isolate single offices and apartments within the wider facade, then printed a number of the images at mural scale so individual figures and rooms could be picked out from across the gallery. The effect turns the everyday transparency of the modern office tower into a study of the city as a mechanism for accidental, mutual watching, where every lit window is both a subject and a potential vantage point.

Published by Aperture in association with the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, the book includes an essay by curator Elizabeth Siegel and extends Wolf's long-running interest, elsewhere in his work, in the density and anonymity of the contemporary city.