Systems of Belief

Systems of Belief

Two thirds of all humans live in cities. Man-made, these cities show what their residents believe and care about. Speed, productive gain, efficiency, power, profit, history, community, safety: The beliefs don't always line up, they collide. Niemeyer's photographic lens looks at these colliding belief systems: a condo next to a freeway, a wedding next to a construction site, a corporate arcadia nested in a wasteland. He hopes that these pictures make us more aware of what we believe, what we care for, what we neglect, and how it all aches to fit together.

Viaduct addresses a fundamental truth about living in California. Viaducts bring the most basic resource, water, to the areas where the most people want to live. Constructed as they are, they need to be maintained constantly in order to keep the fantasy of plenty going.

The image above, Architectural Glass, reflects a corporate belief system of manufactured transparency: We can see in, but we can’t move freely. A structure of dots, in focus, and a view of an escalator behind the dots, out of focus, suggests the illusion of corporate control: beyond the corporate matrix of classifications and procedures lies the great unknown of reality.

Pacific Steel reflects a corporate belief system of imaginary permanence: Corporations believe that they will exist forever, on a constant course of productive gains. An abandoned factory in the heart of the Bay Area suggests otherwise, and yet, that smokestack stands.

Mission Bay is a hospital complex that fundamentally centers on human health and healing. Its cartesian appearance however foregrounds the notion that humans must fit into existing structures of classification connecting diagnosis, cost, and therapy. Does the opacity and anonymity also promote the right to privacy? In the end, an air of absence seems to dominate this landscape.

Shortly after Niemeyer photographed this Cool Globe, it disappeared. The globe, installed in 2008, was meant to celebrate global warming awareness. Originally, it was brightly painted with blue oceans, green continents and symbolic creatures: Save the Planet! Over the years, it became covered in graffiti and eventually got painted pitch black before it was removed by the City of Berkeley. Different instances of the cool globe in other locations fared better.

The San Francisco Panama Pacific exhibition of 1915 centered around Manifest Destiny, another System of Belief. Following the 1906 earthquake, leading citizens of San Francisco used the exhibition platform to show how well they recovered from the disaster. At the same time, the troubling statue “End of the Trail” formed an ideological centerpiece of that exhibit, just as the Panama Canal opening seemed to complete the Manifest Destiny project. The statue has long been removed, but the Palace of the Fine Arts is replete with colonist symbology.

A more recent form of Manifest Destiny is the belief that people must commute to work by car. Although empty during the COVID-19 era, the Transbay Bus Terminal was intended to facilitate public transit as an alternative to freeway traffic. The space is a novel corporate and civic joint venture which points at the gradual shift of power from governments to corporations. As a result, the space feels more like a corporate lobby than a public bus station, with exquisite art, massive security, impeccable maintenance and not one instance of graffiti in sight.

Two parts of San Francisco water, the drinking water and the Bay, come in contact under the freeway bridge in SF Water. The Salesforce tower looms in the horizon. At least three distinct periods of the city’s history and ambitions converge on this site.

Prints are available in a gallery edition of 6 and a portfolio edition of 12.