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A LOOK AT THE NEW ERA OF ANTHROPECENE

This week, BuzzFeed News released The Fincen Files, a series of stories looking at corruption and money laundering within the banking industry. Illustrating such a wide-ranging series was no easy task, but Alex Fradkin, an architectural photographer, rose to the challenge beautifully, creating a series of images of banks and financial buildings to help visually tie the series together and evoke a certain mood. Fradkin discusses his work on this project with us here.

How did you start taking pictures of buildings?

My obsession with architecture has always inhabited my heart and mind as long as I can remember. I studied architecture in college and went on to a career in architecture for many years, a goal which I had been singularly focused on since I was 5 years old. It's not that I lost my love of the profession, rather I found something that I loved even more — photography.

Alex Fradkin for BuzzFeed News

My early years of my photo career were more focused on fine art photography, exhibiting in galleries and museums. My primary interest was in investigating, questioning, and exploring contemporary archeological ruins and the destructive tendencies of humans, neglect, hubris, and the effects of time, as they all conspired to inevitably reduce buildings to memories and eventually, oblivion. The FinCEN Files Project was a perfect assignment for someone with my kind of morbid fascination with the built environment where I got to explore the dark side of what architecture can represent.

How was this project similar to and different from your usual architectural work?

I was given a great deal of creative freedom by the BuzzFeed editors, who were familiar with my previous works. They requested something a bit different from the usual architectural photography and encouraged me to explore a photographic atmosphere that supported the narrative of the forthcoming articles, which were focusing on the vast scale of corruption and greed of these particular banks.

I had to abandon my usual inclinations when photographing contemporary architecture, and instead, follow the mood and narrative of what the FinCEN Files exposé. A particular angle that is in opposition to the public image that banking institutions are very careful to project — that being financial wealth, stability, and strict adherence to the law and a moral behavior that has been seen to be a cornerstone of modern civilization. All layers were being meticulously peeled back in the FinCEN Files to reveal a very different kind of reality. This kind of photographic investigation of architecture focusing on the corruption of the occupants is not the direction that is generally requested by my architectural clients and editors.

Alex Fradkin for BuzzFeed News

What was the biggest challenge with photographing banks? Can you talk about your approach?

Well, let’s see? How to photograph the most nondescript and uninteresting structures that are, for the most part, devoid of any real architectural interest or features — basically monuments to banality. Interestingly, there was also a kind of disturbing sublime quality that began to emerge, which I found to be a little bit seductive, especially when I photographed at night, in the rain or mist — a kind of cinematic noir. An interesting juncture of beauty and banality on the outside, and intimating something darker, hidden and mysterious on the inside. This duality became a focal point for me when developing an approach to visually tie the images to the text. An atmosphere and emotion that I hoped would challenge our usual perceptions of what we think we know and assume.

I repeatedly revisited most of the sites when I was able. In this way, I could “design” in my mind an ideal time of day, lighting and the kind of weather I hoped for with each bank. For this assignment, I had the rare luxury of time and could make several visits until I got what I wanted. Very importantly, a collaborative working relationship with the photo editor, Kate Bubacz, was extremely helpful since I could share my progress and get feedback from the team as I developed the emotion and narrative of the photographs. This helped shape the resulting photographs into a more cohesive body of work in relationship to the direction of the article.

One of the decisions we came up with when discussing the developing body of photographs was to reduce the human presence in the images. I ended up rendering people passing by as shadows, moving through these monolithic environments, dwarfed and insubstantial in relationship to the massive scale and power of the banks. The humans in the images are ghostlike and ephemeral, lacking any kind of identity, or personalization, as they move through and around what almost seemed like elaborate stage set.

My job as I saw it was to make sure the photos were in service to the article and to do what I could to help turn viewers into readers. The vast majority of the work was being meticulously compiled by a global effort of hundreds of journalists and many news organizations for over a year, all working in secret and in some cases, at considerable risk. It is my hope that the photographs honor their efforts and, at least in some small way, help bring attention to the massive scale of the corruption and money laundering that was revealed in the FinCEN Files.