BRUTALIST BEAUTY
“Even graffiti, if you see it in a different way, can be celebratory. I don’t think it and these buildings always need to be associated with violence. They are quite grand structuresin their own way.” DAVID HEPHER
Or, at least, they were once grand. They were once modernist symbols of regeneration and great concrete odes to Le Corbusier’s infatuation with “breton brut”. In the UKin particular, this strain of modernism, the one that spawned structures such as The British Film Institute and The National Theatre on the Southbank, became known as Brutalism, and it accounted for many concrete high rise housing blocks like those we encounter in Hepher’s pictures. Structures like Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in West London once represented modernism’s last stand. Goldfinger himself lived on the top floor of a similar building to try and demonstrate the benefits of high rise living to a cynical public; tall buildings served a worthy function at a time when local councils were still reeling from war damage. But then came tales of women raped in the elevators and children robbed by heroin addicts, and so the buildings earned a reputation. Today, these tall, dank buildings, once upon a time built for the good of society, are seen as towering symbols of inner city angst.
Hepher, it seems, wants to remind us of a more illustrious past. His pictures are not intended, as I presumed, as social commentary or doom-laden depictions of degeneration. They aren’t as predictable as that, and that’s why I like them. Painted on canvases of concrete, making them both of the city and about it, Hepher combines graffiti and photographs of these buildings to try and shift people’s opinions about objects they uniformly condemn as ugly or dangerous. He sees beauty where others don’t.
The conservative view puts both graffiti and tower block living in the same hat as gun crime and gang culture, but Hepher, a man of 72 years no less, uses his creativity to show us that this isn’t necessarily the case.
