Höfer's spaces are timeless and changeless. Aside from a few stray computer screens in one photo, and the modernist architecture of another, they betray nothing of their historical context. One imagines Louis XIV just outside the frame of the Fontainebleau photographs, revoking the Edict of Nantes; indeed, all the works seem to be filled with an admiration for the monarchy, luxe, calme, et volupté. Where Robert's works are always crawling with people, Höfer's only exist to be looked at, as a cat may look at a king.

"Capitalist production has unified space," wrote Guy Debord. "In order to become ever more identical to itself, to get as close as possible to motionless monotony, the free space of the commodity is henceforth constantly modified and reconstructed." But in Höfer's photographs, this constant creative destruction and reinvention of space has become superfluous; they represent motionless monotony attempted and achieved. Coldness, distance, a feeling of smallness and isolation: these, in the words of Höfer herself, are the aesthetic effects of her work. They are the features of a space no longer lived, but spectacular. Who can help feeling small and distant when faced with a built environment from which all trace of the human has been erased?

Candida Höfer, Château de Fontainebleau, 2007, C-print, 81 x 102 inches. Via Yvon Lambert Paris.

It would be simple-minded to dismiss Höfer as a reactionary. She seems as ambivalent about her work's implications as the spectator is forced to be. It is courageous of her to present these images drained of all subjective content, to voluntarily renounce every emotional appeal and political harangue; there is something here of the clinical genius of the late Robbe-Grillet. Yet, despite the undeniable power of these enormous prints, it is difficult to like them. A minimalist white-on-white canvas or a Duchamp ready-made can provoke anger in people accustomed to more representational styles of art; her works are as immune to any such fury as to rapture. Perhaps that is only because the mirror she holds up to the spectacle is a little too accurate, too familiar, to inspire much emotion.