The image to your right shows an exemplary building in the newly built suburbs of Casablanca. The photographer has placed a donkey, his rider, and stones in front of the Cité Verticale, a famous high-rise building designed by the young George Candilis, Vladimir Bodiansky, and Shadrach Woods. The building is shown after completion in the year 1952, and the photograph attempts to depict the area in which it was built. By placing an animal with a rider in non-European clothing, sand, and some stones into the foreground, with the newly built modernist structure in the background, this picture almost shouts to us: This is modernism but not in Europe!
Animal, man, or women in traditional clothing and a rugged terrain are central signifiers for a photographic tradition of modernist architecture in the global south. This imagery got central in the 1950s and in the 1960s. We find it in the representations of modernist projects realized in Israel, Iraq, or India as well as in the famous photos by Ernst Scheidegger of Chandighar. On a formal and content level, modernist architecture depicted by European cameras showed contrast by placing a donkey, cow, or camel in front of the bright shiny facades. Sometimes they stand just alone. Sometimes they form a group with a farmer, kids, veiled women, nomads, palm trees, or cactus. In some of the photographs the local population is seen only from the back. They seem to passively receive what the modern future will bring, without playing an active role in it. This Orientalist repertoire links back to European painting traditions, in which the formal language in landscape painting was kept intact, while small signifiers of difference were pasted into the visual canon of the West to mark the non-European-ness of the locality. This oriental tradition is kept intact in the modernist photographic tradition. Moroever, the colonial modern aesthetic adds a new layer of meaning to the rural animal or local inhabitant. They become a symbol for the pre-modern, the not yet modern, the ones who have to become modern.
Animals, rugged territory, and local inhabitants become signifiers of the past, while the white walls, the asphalt street, the car, the pylon stand for that which is to come: the future.
The past is what the modern project wants to racically overcome by means of industrialization and modernization. Thus, the juxtaposition of the not yet modern and the latest modernist project does not just mark the pre-modern state from which the modernist project wants to distinguish itself but also its very field of its intervention. The past needs to be transformed by the modern means of education, industrial production, mass consumption, and its new living environments and lifestyles. Thus the photographic representation of the modernist housing estate in the south can be understood as an icon and a metapher of the modernist project itself. It created a colonial modern language of the hinterland that needs to be developed by engineers and urban planners. And as colonial modernization was not only directed at and against the colonized, this imagery also played a major role within the modernization projects in Europe’s metropolise, as Paul Rabinow pointed out on the French colonial mission: “If there was a civilizing mission, its target was the French.” (MvO)
Paul Rabinow (1989): French Modern. Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. 286.
