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Architecture of Authority by Richard Ross
For the past several years - and with seemingly limitless access - Richard Ross has been making unsettling and thought provoking pictures of architectural spaces that exert power over the individuals within them.
From a Montessori preschool to churches, mosques, and diverse civic spaces - a Swedish courtroom, the Iraqi National Assembly hall, the United Nations - the images in Architecture of Authority build to ever harsher manifestations of authority: an interrogation room at Guantanamo, segregation cells at Abu Ghraib, and finally, a capital-punishment death chamber.
Though visually cool, this work deals with hot-button issues: the surveillance that increasingly intrudes on post-9/11 life, the abuse of power, the erosion of individual liberty. The connections among the various architectures are striking: as Ross points out: "The Santa Barbara Mission confessional and the LAPD robbery homicide interrogation rooms are the same intimate proportions. Both are made to solicit a confession in exchange for some form of redemption."
