Though John Pawson is best known for architecture, not photography, in the ground-breaking installation Spectrum, the acclaimed designer perfectly aligns the two sides of these two typically disparate practices. What began as a book, published by Phaidon in late 2017, has become a sculptural presentation that asks the viewer to inhabit the work, rather than simply look at it. Spectrum is about space, dimension and time and ultimately shifts the narrative about photography as art to one about photography as sculpture and experience, breaking boundaries between disciplines to emerge with something entirely new.

Interested in the subtle but critical differences between what the lens and the eye can render, Pawson’s photographs record the world around him in a seductively reduced manner, using the camera to commit to the totality of a record, rather than subjective memory. And yet, across each image, an obsession with detail, light, texture and colour are so markedly palpable that the photographer’s hand and preoccupations build across the images. In Spectrum we see what Pawson may have seen when he captured the composition. We also see what he could have missed, by bringing our own unique perception to the permanence of his photographic record.

Pawson’s architectural installation of all 320 photographs that first appeared in the book intensifies the sense of visual encounter and takes the viewer on a physical journey from light to dark and white to black. The immersive experience uses the entirety of a gallery space, where the chromatic spectrum is legible from both ends of the room. As in the book, the photographs are a uniform size and shown in double-sided pairs. Using a hanging system developed for minimum visual distraction and suspended at eye level, the photographs appear even more abstracted than in the book, reading as washes of colour, charged with emotional resonance. Experienced in the round and as a totality, Spectrum challenges us to question the photographic terrain on which it stands. Spectrum first appeared in May 2018, in an iconic brutalist building in central London and was curated by art historian Carrie Scott for The Store X.