Disneyworld is apparently the model: an old-style city gate marks the entrance and regulates entry. It recalls mediaeval castles and fortresses, protected by towering walls and deep moats, with two, four, six or even more gates (depending on the size and importance of the city) to monitor access and the flow of traffic. In the photograph by Laurence Bonvin, only the gate has been reconstructed -- two octagonal towers with a connecting bridge. The towers provide shelter for the security guards; the connecting bridge bears the name of the community. Barriers regulate the traffic during the day. Behind them, slightly concealed, one can make out a modern, electronically controlled iron gate -- the real gate flanked by perimeter walls. Its presence turns the freestanding old-style gate into pure embellishment, staffage, into a theatrical backdrop with symbolic implications.

The picture shows the entrance to a Scancity, a gated community, as the residential areas are called which have begun mushrooming behind tall walls and fences on the outskirts of major cities. Depending on the neighbourhood and the social class, the estate may contain only housing or provide other amenities like shopping, entertainment, restaurants, first aid and more. Whatever the case, they all serve the purpose of exclusion, of cutting off the outside world in order to protect the residents within from crime. Everyone who enters is checked: if you can prove you belong or have called ahead, you can enter; if not, you stay out. At night, the surrounding fences are illuminated from outside. These are estates for the well-to-do, who feel the need to ward off the potential consequences of mental and criminal envy. They are self-imposed, golden cages for those who earn, act and think alike, their enclosure embodying the ambivalence of freedom and imprisonment, of individualism and conformity.

This new form of settlement is based on the housing developments that enjoyed their heyday in 1970s America -- shooting out of the ground and transforming vast open landscapes into occupied territories. It is a faceless residential architecture with its shallow imitation of historicizing styles, and it transformed the wide-open spaces of the United States into an endlessly sprawling suburb for the upper-middle-classes. In his series of pictures, “Maryland” and “Park City”, American photographer Lewis Baltz demonstrated the economic and pragmatic efficiency with which such housing developments and rapidly growing cities subverted the Western world’s notion that a city ideally has a centre and a meaningful, hierarchical structure. Like a surveyor, Baltz mapped out the landscape in photographs that show how economic criteria and the real estate industry nullified the distinction between urban and nonurban.

What was happening in the cities and in the countryside required a new kind of photography, a topographical photography that was no longer based on the utopia of nature (as in the work of, say, Carlton Watkins, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Minor White). The notion of a utopia was no longer of use to the new photographers in their study and investigation of current developments in cities and suburbs. Early exponents (Lewis Baltz as well as Robert Adams, Joe Deal, Stephen Shore, Frank Golke, and others, known as the “New Topographers”) began to deploy visual purism and the congruence of form and content as a critical instrument. Instead of cultivating the illusion of skilled photographic artistry, they devoted themselves to the illusion of mechanistic description and, in this way, called on the viewers of their photographs, the subjects of the viewing, to take a profoundly new approach, specifically, to take a non-selective, unsentimental view of the world, of the actual world currently confronting them. In the 60s and 70s of the past century, the picture of the landscape became real. The image overtook reality; it was pared down to become pragmatically documentary.

Bonvin’s urbanist photography is in line with this tradition. Since the early 90s, she has focused largely on urban phenomena, in particular, the margins of cities, urban development beyond the actual urban belt, where one finds the frayed edges of an ordered, anonymous and faceless globalised periphery. Her new works trace the rampant growth of suburban Istanbul. Here, as in many other places in Europe and elsewhere, time-lag copies of the American model are spreading across the landscape. However, the housing developments are not located out in the open country as in the United States, nor do they embody the American ideals of unlimited freedom and individuality. Instead they circle like little moons around planets, around the mother city, redefining the old model of the European or Oriental town: town walls once offered the population protection against foreign powers and the importunity of natural forces; they promised strength in numbers. Conversely, life in such close quarters required socialized, ordered, community-minded conduct. In today’s lifeless residential areas, only the well-to-do can count on such promise. Their communities provide protection above all within and against their own society: they are physical, built signs of socialization and solidarity in decline.

In the precise, documentary settings of her colour photographs, the artist tracks down the ambivalent situations and structures attendant upon these developments. For example: in the foreground a street, flanking it a concrete wall gradually rising in height, above it a high wall of boulders blocking the view; the only sign of human habitation is the gable of a home just visible at the top of the picture. The photograph visually embodies the polarity of walls that both protect and imprison. Second example: in the foreground a walled estate, in the background a street, a vanishing point disappearing into the distance. A little girl wearing a swimsuit and holding a doll stands alone and lonely in the back light of the driveway. The gate of the estate becomes a focal point in the landscape that defines and directs what we see and think, that generates a divisive here and there. Example three: a gravel path that makes a U-turn, swerving away from the emptiness beyond and probably leading back to the housing estate. Instead of tapering out into the natural landscape, a loop is shown within closed, monitored premises illuminated for evening walks. Example four: a picture taken at night. To the left, a glass door leading to the veranda of a one-family house, in the middle a tiled floor that leads to the out-of-frame swimming pool to the right, in back a perfect, cultivated lawn with a carefully planted arrangement of little trees and bushes. The illumination of the garden before the surrounding wall blends in with the beams of the streetlights on the hill rising in the background. Light plays the role of surveillance; light proves to be an instrument of power. And the fifth example: affluent homes, neatly lined up on a slope, fill the picture plane. The homes are like peas in a pod, each of their turquoise blue swimming pools radiating the promise of freedom, framed, monitored and conventional. The idea of individualised living visibly clashes with the uniformity of the architecture.

The ambivalence of gated communities is at its most conspicuous when there is neither a wall nor a gate because apparently enough protection is provided by searchlights, security booths and barbed wire, rolled out as in a prison or military camp. The resort in this photograph has become a prison: the built promise of Paradise proves to be a dead end.

In picture after picture, Bonvin tells a quiet, unspectacular story about this new form of housing. Her city-landscape pictures are like still lifes: gate with child, landscape panorama with swimming pool, woman knitting in backyard, park with video surveillance, dwarf trees with waterfall in alpine stone garden. The situations arranged with meticulous care appear almost lifeless, frozen; the people, usually with their backs turned to the viewer, convey the presence of absence. With considerable effort and sophisticated artificiality, the estates are pitted against the existence of the natural environs -- they look like stage sets and communicate an emptiness that is underscored by the situations Bonvin chooses to photograph. These are deliberately shaped and designed communities, but they will never be infused with life as in a small town. They are and will always be constructed realities, enmeshed in a jumble of pros and cons -- for freedom, prosperity and privacy, against curiosity, envy and the assault of their poorer compatriots. The driving force behind Laurence Bonvin’s quiet and precise visual narratives proves to be the wish to reveal the potential social and psychological consequences of housing forms characterized by such paralysis, rigidity fragmentation of community life.

.