NEW YORK CITY
That suggestion of other worlds runs through Chiara’s photographs. The skies are red, yellow, green or impenetrably black. The more Modernist and unadorned the architecture, the more it appears like a setting in a comic book; you fully expect to see a caped figure zooming by. The conjunction of the skies and the high-rises can at times look full-on apocalyptic. How often have we seen red skies on science-fiction paperback covers? And how many times did filmmakers of the black-and-white era employ a rapid flicker from positive to negative and back as a shorthand way of conveying the impact of an atomic blast? That the images are depopulated does not help to deter that sort of anxiety. - Luc Sante