Miami Reframed

IN IMAGES

With Miami in Color****, photographer Marianne Doz pares the city down to its planes, angles, and light.

By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Marianne Doz.

Marianne Doz frames only walls. She cuts the sidewalk, the passerby, and the sign, everything that would date the scene, keeping only the wall, its edge, and the shadow that crosses it. This taste for bare form comes, no doubt, from sculpture, which has captivated her since childhood as much as photography has.

The turn came in 2014, on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, during a trip guided by professional photographers who introduced her to what she calls “true photography.” Grounded by lockdown, she turned her lens on the buildings of her Paris neighborhood, before carrying the method to Miami. The book moves through four neighborhoods: Miami Beach, Wynwood, Downtown, and the Design District, where she captures a palm frond’s shadow laid across pink and a red spiral staircase set within an opening edged in yellow.

Around 1980, in South Beach, designer Leonard Horowitz, co-founder of the Miami Design Preservation League, devised for the district’s fading Art Deco buildings a palette of pastels drawn, he said, from sunrises and sunsets, from the ocean, and from the sand. The district, repainted over the course of the decade, became the backdrop for the police drama Miami Vice. The show gave the genre its linen blazer and its bare ankles, the signature look of actor Don Johnson.

Every photograph passes through post-production. Every photograph passes through post-production. There Marianne Doz chooses one color, or a pairing of two, and backs it into a corner. The painter Josef Albers, who taught at the Bauhaus and later at Yale, showed in his book Interaction of Color that a color changes appearance according to whatever borders it. By leaving only two or three planes of color in the frame, Marianne Doz lets the blue of the sky set the temperature of whatever pink or orange it touches.

Among the images, one page, entirely red, carries a line from the German-American architect Mies van der Rohe: “Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.” The red of that page belongs to the book’s palette, so the quotation becomes a color plate in its own right. Marianne Doz turns the architect on his head: she takes the structure apart and keeps only the paint that covered it. In her world, walls stand by color alone, without the bricks.