Projects

Projects · Bogotá, Colombia · 2010

Five Nights at the
Virgilio Barco

Nobody commissioned it. Nobody paid for it. One photographer’s obsession with Rogelio Salmona’s masterwork — and what it cost to light it.

Photographs & words by Mike Butler

8: Months of permits
5: Nights on site
10: Final photographs
$0: Commissioned budget

Nobody hired me to photograph this building. I paid for it myself, because it had never been seen the way I knew it could be seen.

Virgilio Barco Library by Rogelio Salmona, architectural photograph by Mike Butler — Salmona’s brick, drawn out of the dark. Every light in the frame was placed by hand.

The Virgilio Barco Library sits deep in the heart of Bogotá, Colombia, more than eight thousand feet above the sea, in a city held in the palm of the Andes. These are not mountains as backdrop. They are the oldest presence in the frame — ranges that carried civilizations before there was a word for Colombia, that shaped how its people build, gather, and remember. Rogelio Salmona, the greatest Colombian architect of the twentieth century, did not put a building in front of them. He built one that answers them: spiraling ramps that move like the foothills, still water that holds the sky, brick laid with the patience of masonry that expects to outlive everyone who touched it.

Nearly all architecture is photographed in daylight, for the simple reason that nearly all architecture is built for daylight. The sun is the light the architect designed for, so the sun is the light the camera obeys. I wanted to disobey. As an artist, I wanted to see what this building becomes when you go against the grain of its own design — when every beam of light is placed by a human hand, deliberately, where the architect never planned for one. Done right, artificial light doesn’t falsify a building. It reveals a deeper layer of it — the structure beneath the structure. I didn’t come to capture the Virgilio Barco. I came to put my fingerprint on it.

Why

In most of the world, a library is a box. This one is an argument.

Virgilio Barco Library exterior architecture, Bogotá, Colombia — The ramps answer the Andes behind them.

I made these images to put my vision on a building I love. But there was a second reason, and it’s the one that kept us going through the cold nights: I wanted the world to see that Colombia — and countries like it, the ones nobody thinks of — hold architectural monuments of the first rank. A library here is not a box with books in it. It’s an experience. It’s the depth of a country’s culture, built in brick and water, open to anyone who walks in.

The world has noticed, too. Virgilio Barco anchors BibloRed, Bogotá’s public library network — the network the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation honored with its Access to Learning Award, a million-dollar grant recognizing what these libraries do for people who have the least.

Virgilio Barco Library at night, Bogotá — photograph by Mike Butler

I run a business. We’re in it to make money, same as anyone. But you have to find the moments where you can give something back — and if there’s some self-promotion tangled up in it, fine. What I’m promoting is Colombia. What I’m promoting is culture.

Night view of Virgilio Barco Library in Bogotá with illuminated circular pavilion and reflection in water — The circular pavilion, lit from the ground and held in the reflecting pool.

The production

Eight months of paperwork for five nights of light.

Getting access to a Colombian national landmark after hours is not a phone call. It took eight months of planning, working hand in hand with local politician Fernando Rojas, the Ministry of Education, and the library itself, before a single case of equipment came off the truck.

Interior of the Virgilio Barco Library, Bogotá, photographed by Mike Butler — Inside the reading rooms, lamplight balanced against Salmona’s geometry.

Then five nights on site, running ground-based and drone-mounted lighting systems together — pulling texture out of the brick, tracing the undulating curves of the pathways, balancing lamplight against the mountains behind the building. Ten photographs came out of it. Every one of them built, not found.

And Bogotá in 2010 was not a city where you wandered a dark park at three in the morning with cases of camera equipment. We worked every night under armed security, with guard dogs beside us the whole way through.

The cost

The building took everything we had. Literally.

Interior of Virgilio Barco Library with brick arches and geometric architecture

Long, cold nights with very little to eat. Cold coffee. Dan, my first assistant, went down with altitude sickness — Bogotá sits at 2,600 meters and does not care how fit you are. Craig, my second assistant, woke on the third night vomiting and was out of the shoot. Fania, my producer, gutted it through every freezing hour to the end.

I made it through the five nights of shooting. On the sixth, I was in a hospital bed , and I stayed down for a week and a half. That’s what the pictures cost. I’d pay it again.

I self-funded the entire thing and gave it away. Some buildings earn that.

Exterior of Biblioteca Virgilio Barco at dusk with brick architecture, Bogotá — Dusk, with the Andes coming up behind the building.

What happened next

A personal project that stopped being personal.

Reading room interior, Biblioteca Virgilio Barco, Bogotá, Colombia

The work went up as a major public exhibition at Parque 93 in Bogotá. El Tiempo covered it. So did Caracol Noticias. Canal Capital brought me in to talk about it on air, and Rangefinder ran the project for a photography audience that knows exactly how hard the lighting was.

Interior brick and geometry, Biblioteca Virgilio Barco, Bogotá

From the experience came two films: La Foto, a documentary that has screened at festivals internationally, and a behind-the-scenes film shot during those five nights. Both are below.

Parque 93 Exhibition
El Tiempo
Caracol Noticias
Canal Capital
Rangefinder

Reflection pool at the Virgilio Barco Library, Bogotá, photographed by Mike Butler

The documentary Watch La Foto Five nights, on set Behind the scenes

Thirty years of this

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