Candida Höfer’s photographic work is often described as a portrayal of an “architecture of absence” due to her recurring focus on public or semipublic spaces devoid of any human presence. This absence does not, however, imply that there are no traces, no imprints of those who have passed or normally pass through them. When viewing these images, it is as though one is anticipating the arrival of people and for the everyday functions and the institutional systems the spaces represent to come back to life. The series of photographs taken at the Banco de España in 2000 undoubtedly reveals this interest, further heightened by the fact that, while ostensibly a public institution, the bank is perceived as somewhat inaccessible due to the security needs inherent to its purpose. In these two images, Höfer has shot spaces marked by the presence of clocks, which, somewhat anecdotally, record the exact times the photographs were taken: one of the bank’s main banking hall and the other of the current library, which was formerly the treasury hall of the original building designed by Eduardo de Adaro.

A certain seriality in the elements reflects Höfer’s interest in repetition, the search for an internal order within architecture and a fundamental sense of the decorative. This impulse, inherited from her mentors Bernd and Hilla Becher, can be read in the filigree of the white wrought iron of the current library, which frames the oeil de boeuf clock crafted by Ramón Garín around 1891. The clock, well integrated – almost camouflaged – into the building’s distinctive interior design, replaces the sequence of roundels with Mercury heads that originally ringed the first floor. Notably, this clock was photographed by Höfer when its frame was painted white (having been restored since to reveal its original wood finish), further blending it into the architecture. This photograph shares a curious feature with the one in the main banking hall: the photograph avoids symmetry by subtly shifting the framing laterally. The latter image highlights the increasingly functional nature of the building after the extensions completed by José Yarnoz in 1936, which aspire to a new classicism that converses, rather than competes with, Adaro’s eclectic interiors. The photograph of the main banking hall is one of the images that best distills the serial nature reflected in Höfer’s interest in minimalism: it is one of the most iconic spaces in the building and, like the other works in this series, explores institutional architecture by capturing its atmosphere and history at a specific moment in time. Yet there is an element that Höfer skillfully picks up on, adding personality to the interior: the large central clock, which, together with the stained-glass ceiling (left deliberately out of frame by Höfer, except for the light it casts into the space), embody the Art Deco aspirations of this space. The monumental mass of this clock – perfectly coordinated with its surroundings – dominates the lower half of the photograph like a totem, seemingly indicating a symmetry that the background framing, as already mentioned, subtly rejects.

Beyond their intrinsic value as part of Candida Höfer’s photographic oeuvre, these images document both spaces at a particular point in their history within a building undergoing significant internal changes to update and adapt its facilities for various functions. Höfer’s work accentuates the specific moment, the sense of time, which the clocks undoubtedly help to emphasize. All of this coalesces with the photographer’s ability to focus a probing and essentialist eye on not only the architecture most amenable to it (that of modernism and its derivatives), but also on a profoundly eclectic building like the Banco de España.

Carlos Martín