Candida Höfer’s photography has been defined as the portrait of an ‘absent architecture’, as she often returns to public or semi-public spaces with no human presence. However, the absence of people does not mean that there is no mark or imprint of the people who have passed through those spaces. On observing these images, It is as if people are expected to arrive and undertake and their everyday functions in the context of the institutional apparatus that they represent. The series of photographs taken in the Banco de España in 2000 reveals that same interest, with the added fact that it is an institution seen as a place that is difficult to access, even though it is public, given the security requirements inherent in its function. Höfer chose three groups of spaces according to their accessibility: two which are public (the main staircase and the library), two with limited access (the old historical archive and the entrance to the lifts to the Gold Chamber) and one whose use has varied over time (the Lobby at Plaza Cibeles, the main public entrance to the building before the extension opened in 1936).

Also in the year 2000, Höfer took photographs in other spaces of power and institutional representation in Spain, including the interiors of the royal palaces of Madrid and Aranjuez. The photo of the main stairs to the Bank’s building from the Paseo Del Prado shares with them a way of highlighting a certain opulence that is today in disuse, typical of the way that institutional architecture was seen in the 19^th century. She seems to focus on the seams and textures of the Carrara marbles of the staircase under the gaze of the bust of José Echegaray sculpted by Lorenzo Coullaut, standing alone on its rotunda and looking out over the surrounding emptiness. A certain serial quality to the elements (the visual rhythm of the stairs, of the bannisters and the other decorative details that converge in the central opening) allows Höfer to delve further into the repetitive, into the search for an internal order in the architecture. This is repeated in the wrought iron latticework of the library, which was once the Trading Floor of the building, designed by Eduardo Adaro at the end of the 19^th century. But that serial character, showing the interest in the minimalist of Bernd & Hilla Becher’s inherited by Höfer, is clearest in the photo of the historical archive, with a notable vanishing point where the compactus lines end with documentation and the rhythmical gaps of the windows, shown as they were before the recent full refurbishment of the space by the Paredes Pedrosa architectural studio. Apart from the intrinsic value of the works as part of Candida Höfer’s photographic oeuvre, these photos document the spaces shown at a certain point in their history, in a building whose interior has undergone significant changes to update and adapt its premises to its different functions.

Carlos Martín