I am interested in contemporary art because it speaks to us of our times and of ourselves,” the German-Spanish art collector Helga de Alvear once said, “because it creates and develops a language that can explain, in a new way, the world in which we happen to live and of which we often only brush the surface.” Delving below the surface takes many forms, one of which is documentary photography that depicts the havoc that mankind is wreaking on the planet.

When she passed away in February 2025 at age 88, de Alvear left behind her collection of thousands of works of art, mainly housed in Spain in a Madrid gallery and a Cáceras museum that both bear her name. While the vast archive ranges from abstract sculpture to video installations, it includes a trove of architectural photography, unflinching pictures both aesthetically rich and psychologically disturbing.

A select slice of this imagery—on view in the exhibition After All, at Madrid’s Serrería Belga (Belgian Sawmill Cultural Space) through July 27—comes across as a bleak assessment of modern life and an environmental clarion call. It focuses on European and Asian urban scenes in times of cultural flux: between the two world wars, after the global housing boom of the 1950s, and then after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The work reflects an increasingly soulless, mechanized, utilitarian set of cityscapes marked by cookie-cutter housing, massive machinery, disposable structures, and indifferent masses, all captured in stunning, large-scale photos by gifted artists.

Housed in a converted industrial space (a former sawmill more than a century old) that’s been transformed into a spacious gallery, After All serves as the titular exhibition at Madrid’s PHotoESPAÑA 2025. The annual festival once again hosts more than 100 photo shows in and around Spain’s capital city through the summer, with this centerpiece exhibition epitomizing the themes of transformation and challenges amid uncertainty.

Reflecting the benefactor de Alvear’s German roots, much of this work hails from the Düsseldorf School of Photography, founded and led by the husband-wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher in the 1970s at the famed art academy Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. More than a decade earlier, the Bechers had set out to document “anonymous sculpture” subjects in the European landscape: mechanical marvels teetering on the edge of obsolescence, from grand old water towers (at top) to charmingly idiosyncratic housing (below left). Seeking to capture found artifacts before they were gone, the Bechers developed a straight-on, flat-light, geometric pictorial style stemming from the documentary photography pioneered by Eugène Atget, whose images of Paris’s Parc de Saint-Cloud (below right) set the tone for the show.

As the century progresses, the scenery gets weirder. The Bechers’ disciples at Düsseldorf include a host of famous names in architectural art—Josef Stoffels, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, and Thomas Struth, all duly represented—who employ the same precise yet detached documentary style to scenes of empty modernity. Mostly devoid of people, the pictures may be beautiful, even if the subjects are not.

Stoffels’s midcentury studies of power station machinery in Western Germany (above left) echo Lewis Hine’s 1920s powerhouse scenes, sans workers, further mechanizing them. Ruff takes industrial gear’s glossy sheen a step further by colorizing many shots in his Machinen series, one of the few cases of artificial manipulation populating this “objective” show. Ruff shoots it much straighter in his architectural studies of local housing projects in Düsseldorf (above right). Here we see prefab modular structures, readily assembled (and dismantled) replacing the handmade craftsmanship that marked European architecture before the world wars and population explosion of the latter 20th century.

Indeed, the collected work—with nary a computer or cellphone in sight—reflects a creeping sense of globalization dwarfing humanity. One of the most famous Düsseldorf graduates, Andreas Gursky, often adds distance and perspective by shooting from elevated vantage points, somehow retaining painterly detail in the images. (Canadian lensman Edward Burtynsky has taken this approach even further by incorporating helicopters and drones in his gorgeously grotesque studies of industrial sites around the world, currently on view at New York’s International Center of Photography, and worthy of their own essay.) 

It seems that technology is helping us to see how much damage we’re doing. “I see myself as a chronicler. My pictures try to encapsulate our time,” Gursky recently told Gagosian Quarterly. “I’m toying with the tension between sublimity and destruction. In all my images I try to allow both—the threat and destruction but also the beauty.”

Featured image: Bernd & Hilla Becher, Typologie, 1987, courtesy Museo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres