MODERNIST MALTA

Originally published January 28, 2009

Last Friday we had the opening of the exhibition on TWENTIETH CENTURY MODERNIST BULDINGS IN MALTA, organised by The Kamra tal-Periti (Chamber of Architects) together with the NGO Din l-Art Helwa with the financial support of HalMann Vella. The exhibition focuses specifically on MODERNIST architecture which in Malta dates from 1930 up to 1970.

The organizing committee appointed five professional photographers to illustrate between 35 and 40 properties that the KTP included on its list of properties worthy of recognition as part of Malta’s more recent architectural heritage. Photographers Patrick Fenech, Alexandra Pace, Sergio Muscat, Matthew Mirabelli and I were briefed to capture the meaning and the beauty of the Modernist movement. We were left to interprete the subject matter in any way we deemed fit, the only proviso being that we did it in black and white.

A publication to accompany the exhibition has also been launched. Partly funded through the assistance of the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts, Modernist Malta: The Legacy in Architecture includes a comprehensive selection of the photographers’ work as well as two significant essays, a historical account of Modernist architecture in Malta by Perit Conrad Thake, a leading architectural historian, and a personal record of Modernist architecture as seen through the eyes of the architects themselves written by Petra Bianchi, director and council member of Din l-Art Helwa. The event and the publication should prove to be of interest not only to architects and engineers, but also to those interested in art and photography, as well as to lovers of Melitensia and Malta’s cultural heritage.

The whole project aims to raise public awareness about the extent and wealth of Modernist architecture in Malta. It is the organisers’ intention to communicate the qualities, originality and spirit of some of the better Modernist works through a photographic display of black and white prints, with models and drawings from the architect’s own archives.

I got involved in the project at a relatively late stage, so only photographed three properties. Well, four actually, if you count the one I photographed by mistake! I was sent to shoot the government school in Floriana near the Mall, and shot the wrong one. I’d no idea that the somewhat more interesting looking building across the street from it was also a school! Maybe because it’s no longer used as a school…anyhow, that’s my excuse! It’s a crying shame really. I still think some of the best shots I took throughout the project were actually of this wrong school, in other words, totally useless and doomed never to see the light of day – until now, that is.

Throughout the shooting process, very different from the stuff I normally do as a news and sports photographer, I found myself seeing things in terms of light and shadow, looking for shapes and patterns formed by the falling light, rather than looking at the architecture per se. I didn’t want to take pictures of the architecture in a forensic way, I wanted to interprete them through the way they form these blocks of light and shadow. The photos below start with the wrong Floriana school then move on to the correct one.