Florian Hanig Libri

Photographer Peter Bialobrzeski here merges the seven Asian cities of Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Jakarta, Singapor, and Shenzhen into a virtual megatropolis. The result is a view of a world that no longer seems real but appears instead as a series of dream-images from an eccentric director or computer game designer. References to reality evoke a sense of conflict in the viewer, as appreciation for the beauty of the absurd competes with recognition of an irreversible process of change in urban living space. Two different growth models are exposed: unscrupulous, uncontrolled expansion, as in Bangkok, and controlled, yet equally unscrupulous growth in a city like Shanghai. The pictures burst with conflicting signs and symbols, mostly indecipherable to the western viewer, a semiotic overkill held in check only by the picture frame.

In nineteenth-century Calcutta, a wealthy Indian elite emerged under the rule of the British East India Company. For their homes, they built eclectic Bengali equivalents of industrialist mansions, which blended traditional Mogul architecture with more classical Western elements. Today these crumbling villas and palaces retain only a shred of their former splendor, and it seems only a matter of time before they will disappear for good. In this volume, 21 emerging photographers work with Peter Biaolobrzeski to capture the fading grandeur of this rich hybrid structures. In 2007, Germany's respected daily newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung commented, "If Calcutta had the appeal of Havana, its palaces would long ago have become the subject of various coffee-table books." At last, such a book exists.