I finally made it to the little exhibition of Denise Scott Brown’s photographs in Betts Project, a small gallery on Central Street in what used to be Finsbury. Her first husband, Robert Scott Brown, a fellow South African, had a Leica and was used to processing photographs. She does not pretend to be a professional photographer: ‘I’m not a photographer. I shoot for architecture – if there’s art here it’s a byproduct’. But she has a good eye for the culture of the American southwest, including, not surprisingly, Las Vegas: ‘In 1965, after ten years of urbanism, my foci were automobile cities of the American Southwest, social change, multiculturalism, action, everyday architecture, “messy vitality”, iconography, and Pop Art. Waywardness lay in more than my eye’.
Scott Brown has a great eye! My friend Martino Stierli, now curator at MoMA, thoroughly researched their private archive, resulting in a wonderful exhibition (2008-09) and catalogue: “Las Vegas Studio; Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown” (Scheidegger & Spiess 2015). Full of fantastic and intimate photographs by DSB of this the most influential moment of their career; for those who want more.
Thank you. Sounds good. Charles