Unseen Amsterdam, the festival of photography held in the Dutch capital over one weekend each year, has a burst of architecture this year with Albumen Gallery’s offering. One of 70 galleries showing in the main Participants Fair held in the culture park Westergas, an industrial site dating from the late 19th century which has since become a city-centre site of art and events.

Now in its 12th edition, it has an international gaze. Albumen Gallery is an online gallery based in London and landing for local events such as Unseen. Their presentation in Amsterdam brings four photographers looking at architectural landscapes in conversation with one another, with Robert Conrad, Steven Seidenberg, Robert Kemnitz, and Edmund Sumner each presenting vantages upon abandonment and emptiness.






If you’re a ruinlust fan, then this is the quartet for you, especially with Thomas Kemnitz’s images of decay, patina, and romantic roughage of found spaces across Germany. Behind each location and image is a depth of research, with the artist seeking to present a sense of the former function, occupants, and history of the place beneath the carefully composed and alluringly lit spaces.

Born in Schönebeck, in what was once Soviet East Germany, the artist is interested in the industrial, political, and social histories of the buildings he discovers – images at Unseen covering all these interests, with a substation control room, STASI command centre, and a ballroom. The ballroom is in Grünau at the edge of modern-day Berlin and on the banks of the Dahme River, once a place where up to 50,000 people would escape the city for rowing, fresh air, and partying. It continued as a place of dancing from the 1890s right through pop and disco into the 1990s before closing down – now only existing as a shell following looting and fires.  






Edmund Sumner might need no introduction to British readers with an interest in architecture, with the photographer’s images recording contemporary architecture in publications and books for the last three decades. Here, Sumner escapes the clutches of capturing seductive shots of modern buildings for promotion and publicity, delving into his personal interests of desolation, abandonment, and deserted architectures.

While his commercial practice takes Sumner to new projects by the likes of RSHP, Conran and Partners, and Tadao Ando, the places depicted for Albumen are a little different. An image of the Crisis Management Department Building in Minamisanriku is tafter Miki Endo, an employee who broadcast information about Japan’s 2011 tsunami to the public who was washed away from the second floor.

But Sumner also shows places in transition, not just after such devastation, in a mix that questions why and how a place is empty. An image shows the grand space of Peckham Station’s Waiting Room, paired back by Benedict O’Looney Architects, Le Corbusier’s Neelam Cinema in Chandigarh carries the marks of thousands of filmgoers, and carved out rock spaces show David Chipperfield Architects’ raw transformation of the Cava Arcari cave complex near Vicenza, Italy – once a stone quarry, now a performance space.








Another former East German photographer, Robert Conrad, captures remnants of the former ideology. Born in 1962, Conrad moved to East Berlin from his childhood home on the Baltic sea in his 20s as his interest in photography and architecture developed. He tasked himself with documenting the disappearing buildings, all the time while watched by the STASI and prevented from studying architecture at university until after 1989.

Conrad passed away last year, but he is represented at Unseen by works taken after the fall of the wall but which look back through different political periods within empty spaces. A telephone booth within a closed-off underground station, the desolate Unter Den Linden U-Bahnhof, and the abandoned Beelitz Sanatorium in Berlin, once a huge military hospital where Hitler was treated in World War one and Erich Honecker, the Chairman of the State Council of East Germany, spent time at the end the Soviet regime.




Steven Seidenberg is not only a photographer, but also a poet and writer. His images seek to carry that sense of the lyrical and narratives beyond the frame. The artists has travelled the world seeking such silent drama in architectures and public spaces, from documenting hospital waste in Thailand to squats in Rome, the fogs of neolithic Dorset to tape used to repair urban infrastructure in Tokyo.

At Unseen, Albumen Gallery are showing images from Seidenberg’s series and book The Architecture of Silence, capturing abandoned homes across the south of Italy. The sense of past personal value and care compressed into buildings with no economic value brings forward ideas about what home, place, and shelter is. With rich Italian light picking up colour-washed surfaces, while the series is punctuated by escape from the faded homes with vast rolling, agricultural landscapes.

The main Participants Fair is supplemented by Participants Unbound, with seven galleries presenting monumental photographic installations using video, performance, sensory experience, virtual reality, sculpture, and landscape within the large Transformatorhuis hall and surrounding park. On top of this, there’s also a vast photographic book fair with over 60 international photographic publishers large and small presenting new publications alongside talks and signings.