This interview is the second installment in a series dedicated to better understanding the oft-maligned architectural style so prevalent across Skopje, North Macedonia – also known as “the European capital of Brutalism.” Launched on the 57th anniversary of the earthquake that led to Skopje’s reconstruction, we sat down with the creators who best understand the city’s ethos and complexion. Read the first interview here.
The last time I visited Skopje, my to-do list included a special trip to Literatura.mk, a buzzing bookstore on the aptly named Macedonia Street that dissects the city center. My mission: to obtain a copy of the glossy, coveted coffee table book, created by local photographer Erina Bogoeva, entitled Skopje: Architecture as a Photographic Sculpture (1963-1990). I got lucky – there were a couple left in stock, and as I stepped out into the beating heart of downtown with the store’s branded bag dangling from my elbow, I felt a sense of relief. The concrete structures that towered over me, punctuating the urban skyline with their dramatic bluntness – or at least, high-resolution prints of them – were mine to hold, to keep, to carry with me long after I’d left their endearing grayness behind.
If this all seems to be an overly sentimental assessment of a collection of Brutalist snapshots, then I would say perhaps you have never met a Brutalist building – lived across the street from one, walked past one every day on the way to school, careened around one in a drab taxi piloted by a disheveled urban veteran more intent on lighting his cigarette than using the steering wheel. To encounter this architectural form is to consider its citified context and question what a building can be. My affinity for this topic might be the reason why I feel a certain kinship with Erina, the photographer who has spent years studying and documenting the visual personhood of Skopje’s Brutalist buildings (it’s no coincidence that her other speciality is portraiture).
And now, despite a country-wide lockdown, publishing house ARS Lamina has recently informed her that her book sold out and is going into reprint. Her photographs capture the humanity of these so often misunderstood buildings and provide a unique, trained perspective on their immensity.
Their bizarre name is said to be a clever play on béton brut, French for ‘raw concrete,’ which, under indulgent sunlight, can be a strikingly beautiful material. Brutalists, then, were a new breed of Modernist architects in the 1960s who sought to convey material honesty in their structures, challenging what they regarded as the bourgeois tradition of pre-war buildings.
Having grown up in the center of Skopje – she describes the North Macedonian capital as the ‘unexpected muse’ of her last decade of creative work – Erina is on familiar terms with the city’s many Brutalist edifices. Her bilingual English and Macedonian blog features architecture across Europe’s metropolises while also contemplating broader questions for photography enthusiasts, such as how to master conceptual self-portraits (she’s done it), how to tackle creative burnout (done that too), and how to maintain her art during quarantine (she’s working on it).
Now, as we chat about concrete and reflect on the success of her book, she shares her observations on how Brutalism has inspired a generation of creatives and left its mark on pop culture, and singles out her own personal challenges, transformed into strengths, that uniquely equip her to thrive in her field.
Brand of People Magazine presents: a conversation with Erina Bogoeva.
How did you first become interested in shooting Skopje’s Brutalist architecture?
Growing up, I never gave the buildings a second look; they were my natural surroundings. I’ve always lived in the city center or somewhere nearby, in the midst of a lot of Brutalism, and I’ve always seen them as my everyday landscape, or cityscape actually. It wasn’t until 2012 when I had a friend who came to town that I even thought about it. He’s a German director and he came to work on a project here in Skopje. I was showing him around and he was so impressed by these Brutalist buildings, by these “monsters,” that I started to notice them and realized that they are quite special because when you pass them every day, they become really ordinary. And they’re not. So it was 2012 when I first started actually working on the project.
For your book?
First, it was actually an exhibition in 2017 in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje. Then the exhibition wasn’t enough – I covered only ten or twelve of the buildings in Skopje – and I realized that they merited a bigger project. That’s when I embarked on the book.
At the same time, the city of Skopje was giving grants for projects like this and they provided a really substantial portion of the grant I wanted to work on the book. I reached out to ARS Lamina, the publisher, and they were really interested. So it was a joint project between them and the city.
Social media nowadays caters to an image-centric method of content consumption. Everything is shifting that way. Have you noticed a revival in interest for Brutalism since this shift has happened?
Definitely. I’ve been actively researching and working on the project since 2012 and each year, I think that there is a bit more attention paid to Brutalism and Modernism and Social Modernism as well, as kind of a sub-branch. I keep seeing artists coming back to it, and not just photographers. I see jewelry makers interested and influenced by it, graphic designers, very different types of artists. And that’s lovely. This architecture is really abundant in Eastern Europe; it would be a shame if people weren’t paying attention and drawing inspiration from it.
When I first moved to Skopje in 2004, I was really taken aback by the architecture that I found there. Once I got over that initial reaction, I liked that it had a moodiness to it, these very graphic forms. I feel that there’s been a bit of a resurgence in people taking pride in it.
Absolutely. The Brutalism and Modernism that we have in Skopje was born in the aftermath of the big earthquake in 1963, when there was a need to rebuild the whole city. And that’s the moment in time when this architecture was happening. It was contemporary then, and that’s why there is such a big concentration of it in Skopje. You can find it in other cities as well around the country, but not as concentrated. And the thing is that, of course, because it’s built in that time, it has the heavy historical context of socialism. It bears the stigma of Yugoslavia (up until some point) for certain generations.
I think that the new generations are unaffected by that stigma. They don’t know what Yugoslavia was, in the sense that they haven’t lived in Yugoslavia. They’ve lived in Macedonia. And that’s why they’re able to take [this architecture] out of the socialist or communist context and appreciate it for the artwork that it is. I’m really happy that’s happening because that’s why I was doing this project: I don’t want our urban legacy to be stigmatized by a specific point in time or a controversial historic context.
It’s interesting what a spectrum of opinion there is regarding the aesthetics of Brutalism.
Well, you know, you can’t really discuss tastes. People may not find Brutalism to their taste. Maybe they like the new stuff better, the Skopje 2014 project’s architecture better. Maybe Brutalism isn’t their style and that’s fine. But I think that opinions have been heavily influenced by the historical context of the buildings.
Part of the rise of interest in Brutalist structures has been driven by pop culture. For example, Dua Lipa shot her Blow Your Mind music video in front of the Barbican building in London; Mable’s summery single Thinking of You was shot in Trellick Tower; the Alexandra Road Estate served as the backdrop for the 1975’s video of Somebody Else. And not just in London – fashion brands in the Balkans shoot campaigns and editorials in front of Brutalist structures: Fashion Weekend Skopje’s season 21 digital edition heavily featured the cityscape’s Brutalist backdrops, and increasingly they’re seen in these kinds of pop contexts.
I think it’s important to find new ways of interpreting old buildings and old monuments. I know a lot of people use them. You had mentioned earlier how a lot of influencers use them for a photo op. And I think that’s great – these buildings make great backgrounds because they are architectural and monochromatic; they usually have just one tone to them. They’re very simple and very strict. You can make anything pop in the foreground if you use these forms as a backdrop, visually speaking. I think it’s nice to have a different context to them, to put them in pop culture, to make them relevant again.
I love that. So let’s talk about your photographic work. You do a remarkable job of balancing the whole building, which is often enormous, with the smaller details of the space. How do you capture all of the essential elements?
It depends on the building, honestly. I usually like to work from detail towards the whole building. So I start with micro details, with parts, and then I work around and come to capture the whole building. I think it’s important to document both aspects, and then I review what approach was most successful for that building or that light or that structure.
How did research inform that process?
I’m very familiar with the buildings in Skopje, because I’ve seen them a thousand times passing by, so I didn’t do much research before going to take the pictures for my project. I did research the lighting and what light they catch at what time of day.
But most of the research for the buildings themselves, I did after taking the pictures. I spent six months, maybe nine months, taking all the photos and then did background research on what the buildings were. Who was the architect? When were they built? I needed to provide some kind of background. Architects created them and these are important people on a cultural level. Architects are artists. So why not show who built what and maybe give a little bit of detail about some buildings, because while I might know what they are, not everybody will.
“In that golden hour light that makes concrete really pop, I felt like if I touched them, I would be touching something in a museum.”
What’s the beauty that you personally derive from these buildings?
I find them very aesthetically pleasing. I know they were supposed to be functional versus pretty. But I find them extremely aesthetically pleasing. I myself did not know that I was a minimalist at heart for a very long time. I used to think my aesthetic was Goth. Well, it wasn’t. It turns out it evolved: it’s simple lines and minimalism. So I find them really pretty. I’ll say it again: tastes vary from person to person. And that’s fine. That’s what makes us all human. But I think that [Brutalist buildings] have this strict beauty and grandiosity. It’s like looking at a sculpture – a sculpture that’s 10 stories high, 18 stories high. Sometimes when I was taking pictures of them and they were in really beautiful light, usually that golden hour light that makes concrete really pop, I felt like if I touched them, I would be touching something in a museum. I wouldn’t want to touch them at all. Maybe that’s just my perspective on them, but I think they’re beautiful.
I also find something very satisfying in the geometry of them. You have a unique challenge as an architectural photographer in that you are trying to capture a very physical, three-dimensional experience in a flat image. What’s your strategy for capturing that spatial experience in an image?
I actually thought about this question quite a lot. I am extremely short in-person, like Kylie Minogue, Kim Kardashian short. And when I go to shoots, I can’t wear high heels, I have to wear sneakers because I need to be flexible. (And I’m really clutzy.) So, as everything in life, I needed to find my own perspective on people, on everything and make it seem like I’m not short as a photographer. And these buildings, whether you’re two meters high or you’re my height, they are basically the same. I try to get as close to them as possible and see them from my own perspective, the short perspective from which I see everything in life. I try to show them from that angle, from my personal experience of being really miniature next to them. That gives them a bit more of a 3D feeling in a 2D image.
You’ve had practice then. It’s like you were fated to become a photographer wherein the whole scope of your job is capturing and manipulating perspective. The experience served you well.
Yeah, I have to work around a few challenges. That’s definitely how we grow!
I came across a book called Architecture Depends by Jeremy Tale. He talks about how architectural photography succeeds in pulling the building out of time; it exists in the timeless medium of the frozen photo. How do you seek to convey the passage of time in your images?
I want to make these buildings important aside from time, to make them timeless, because they are. They are timeless. Even the materials; they’re made from concrete that’s very durable. Unfortunately, many of these buildings haven’t been kept well since the launch of the Skopje 2014 project. A lot of them have been seriously neglected. It’s very sad to see these buildings which once stood for something and were once considered really grand to be in the shadow of something cheap.
Take for example the Macedonian Opera and Ballet. Now, it’s gotten better. We’ve renovated a few things, but when I was taking pictures of it three years ago, it was in an awful state. It’s a really white building, and you could see the leaks from rain, snow, from heavy duty wear. That was the condition when I took pictures of it and I didn’t want it to be presented in the book that way. So I edited a few things out because I wanted the buildings to be timeless. I didn’t want them to show the scars of their suffering from the time when they weren’t maintained.
I think that architecture should be timeless. Especially Brutalism and Modernism: they’re sculptures, and sculptures in which we live, in which we work. Of course, the grain of time is going to show on them, but we should at least try to keep them in their glory.
I think your choice to do some editing to that building is very revealing. I’m not sure how much you want to be political in your work, but inevitably it becomes a political statement if you say, “here’s a photo showcasing all the ways in which our system has failed to provide adequate support for these structures.”
I was torn between keeping them as originals and editing them. They were left as originals in the 2017 exhibition, but I thought that an exhibition allowed me to be a bit more political because an exhibition isn’t something permanent. Within a book, I didn’t want the [structures] to be remembered as these dilapidated buildings. I wanted them to be remembered as beautiful buildings, because people are going to have this book at home and look at it regularly. So that’s why I changed them for the book.
I do believe that it is important to make this type of political statement. I am political in my work. This whole photography project was a bit of a rebellion against Skopje 2014. It was important to think about how people will see these buildings. If I printed them in this bad state, then people might ask, “Why were they important enough to put in a book?” They should be seen in their full glory and their full potential. They should be seen in a way that showcases their artistry.
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All imagery courtesy Erina Bogoeva.
