CAMERA

CONSTRUcTS
Camera Constructs
Photography,
Architecture and the
Modern City
Edited by Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray
First published 2012 by Ashgate publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Camera constructs: photography, architecture and the modern city.
1. Architecture and photography. 2. Architectural photography. 3. Architectural
design - Philosophy. 4. Modern movement (Architecture) 5. Cities and towns in art.
I. Higgott, Andrew. II. Wray, Timothy.
720.2'8-dc23

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Camera constructs: photography, architecture and the modern city / [edited] by Andrew Higgott
and Timothy Wray.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-2145-0 (hardback: alk. paper)
1. Architecture and photography. 2. Cities and towns - History - 20th century.
3. Cities and towns - History - 21 st century. I. Higgott, Andrew. II. Wray, Timothy.

NA2543.P46C362012
720.1 '05-dc23
2011036069

ISBN 13: 978-1-4094-2145-0 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-4724-4538-4 (pbk)
Contents

List of Figures ix
Notes on Contributors xvii
Prefacexxi

Introduction: Architectural and Photographic Constructs 1

Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray

SECTION I MODERNISM AND THE PUBLISHED PHOTOGRAPH

1 Frank Yerbury and the Representation of the New 23

Andrew Higgott

2 Le Corbusier and the Representational Function of Photography 35

Andrzej Piotrowski

3 The Photo-dependent, the Photogenic and the Unphotographable:

How our Understanding of the Modern Movement has been
Conditioned by Photography 47
Peter Blundell Jones

4 ‘At Home’ with the Eameses 61

Rachel Stevenson

5 Private Vistas and a Shared Ideal: Photography, Lifestyle and the

West German Bungalow 73
Carola Ebert

6 A Covert Critique of the Architectural Photograph:

The Editorial Practice of Andrew Mead 91
Robin Wilson
vi Camera COnstructs

SECTION II ARCHITECTURE AND THE CITY RE-IMAGINED

7 Haunted Halls of Mirrors: Photography and the Phenomenology of

Emotional Space 105
Timothy Wray

8 Photography and the Subject of Architecture 125

Edward Whittaker

9 ‘The Synoptic View’: Aerial Photographs and Twentieth-Century Planning 135

Tanis Hinchcliffe

10 Negotiating the City Through Google Street View 147

Ben Campkin and Rebecca Ross

11 Transforming Ideas into Pictures: Model Photography and

Modern Architecture 159
Davide Deriu

12 Worlds Collide: Reality to Model to Reality 179

Mark Morris

SECTION III INTERPRETATIVE CONSTRUCTS

13 Our Man in Havana: Walker Evans’ Photographs for The Crime of Cuba 195
Mary N. Woods

14 Leafing Through Los Angeles: Edward Ruscha’s Photographic Books 211

Steven Jacobs

15 Looking for the Affect of History in the Photographic Work of

Bernd and Hilla Becher 223
Ian Wiblin

16 Order Out of Chaos: Josef Koudelka’s Photographic Constructs 237

Timothy Wray

17 Slow Spaces 247

William Firebrace
 COntents vii

SECTION IV PHOTOGRAPHY IN DESIGN PRACTICES

18 Material Immateriality: Moholy-Nagy’s Search for Space 257

Ivana Wingham

19 Framing the View: The Real and the Imaginary in Photographic Depictions
of the Architectural Work of Mies van der Rohe and Eileen Gray 269
Rosamund Diamond

20 Memorability as Image: The New Brutalism and Photography 283

Andrew Higgott

21 In Defence of Pictorial Space: Stereoscopic Photography and

Architecture in the Nineteenth Century 295
Richard Difford

22 Stereoscopy and the Architecture of Visual Space 313

Penelope Haralambidou

23 Photography as an Agent of Architectural Proposition and Provocation 331

Nat Chard

Index353
9
~
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
List of Figures

1  Frank Yerbury and the Representation 2.4  Drawing of the Balkans by Le Corbusier, 1911
of the New (© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
ADAGP, Paris / F.L.C.)
1.1  Frank Yerbury (photographer), Woolworth
Building, New York, architect Cass Gibert, photograph 2.5  Photograph of Villa d’Este by Le Corbusier,
1926. © Architectural Association 1911 (© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
ADAGP, Paris / F.L.C.)
1.2  Frank Yerbury (photographer), Blue Hall,
Stockholm Town Hall, architect Ragnar Ostberg, 2.6  Drawing of Hadrian’s Villa by Le Corbusier,
photograph c.1925. © Architectural Association 1911 (© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
ADAGP, Paris / F.L.C.)
1.3  Frank Yerbury (photographer), Copenhagen
Police Headquarters, architects Kampmann and Rafn, 2.7  Pennsylvania elevator built for James Stewart &
photograph 1925. © Architectural Association Co., Baltimore, reproduced in Le Corbusier, Vers une
architecture (courtesy of the Fondren Library, Rice
1.4  Frank Yerbury (photographer), Garage Marbeuf, University)
Paris, under construction, architects A. Laprade and
L.E. Bazin, photographed c.1928. © Architectural 2.8  Photograph published by Walter Gropius
Association (courtesy of the University of Minnesota Libraries)

1.5  Frank Yerbury (photographer), Villa Stein, 2.9  Photograph published by Walter Gropius, edited
Garches, architect Le Corbusier, photograph 1929. version re-published by Le Corbusier (courtesy of the
© Architectural Association Fondren Library, Rice University)

2.10  Pages 166 and 167 from Le Corbusier’s Vers

2  Le Corbusier and the Representational une architecture (courtesy of the Fondren Library, Rice
Function of Photography University)

2.1  Photograph by Le Corbusier, Germany, 1910

(© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / 3  The Photo-dependent, the Photogenic
ADAGP, Paris / F.L.C.) and the Unphotographable: How our
Understanding of the Modern Movement
2.2  Drawing by Le Corbusier, Germany, 1910
(© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / has been Conditioned by Photography
ADAGP, Paris / F.L.C.)
3.1  Nikolaus Pevsner, Outline of European
2.3  Photograph by Le Corbusier, Germany, 1911 Architecture, 1960 edition, with Mies van der Rohe’s
(© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / 1929 Barcelona Pavilion presented opposite Gunnar
ADAGP, Paris / F.L.C.) Asplund’s 1935–40 Chapel of the Holy Cross
x Camera COnstructs

3.2  Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion as Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research
reconstructed in the 1980s (author’s photograph) Library at the Getty Research Institute

3.3  Cover of Hitchcock and Johnson’s The 4.2  Julius Shulman (photographer), living room of
International Style, paperback edition Case Study House #8, 1950. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used
with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive,
3.4  Le Corbusier, architect, Villa Savoye (author’s Research Library at the Getty Research Institute
photograph, 1972)
4.3  Page from Arts & Architecture, December 1945,
3.5  Erich Mendelsohn, architect, Schocken Store, an early study of Case Study Houses #8 and #9.
1927. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Printed with permission

3.6  Erich Mendelsohn, architect, Schocken Store 4.4  Julius Shulman setting up a photographic shoot.
1927, site plan by author © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius
Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at
3.7  View from Gunnar Asplund’s great portico
the Getty Research Institute
looking across to Sigurd Lewerentz’s Resurrection
Grove at the Woodland Cemetery, Stockholm 4.5  Pieter de Hooch, A Woman Preparing Bread for a
(author’s photograph) Boy, 1660–1663. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

3.8  Hans Scharoun, architect, ‘Juliet’ block of flats, 4.6  Pieter de Hooch, Family Making Music, 1663. The
Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen 1959 (author’s photograph) Cleveland Museum of Art (Gift of the Hanna Fund)

3.9  Hans Scharoun, architect, Geschwister Scholl

School at Lünen 1958–62 (author’s photograph) 5  Private Vistas and a Shared Ideal:
Photography, Lifestyle and the West
3.10  Hans Scharoun, architect, Ferdinand Möller
House, Zermützelsee ,1937. Ground and first floor German Bungalow
(drawn by author)
5.1  Ernst Deyhle (photographer), Haus Heimsoeth,
3.11  Hans Scharoun, Ferdinand Möller House Bergisch Neukirchen, 1963, architect Walter Brune.
(author’s photograph) View from the garden. Courtesy Walter Brune, © Ernst
Deyhle, Stuttgart
3.12  Hans Scharoun, Ferdinand Möller House
(author’s photograph) 5.2  Ernst Deyhle (photographer), Haus Heimsoeth.
View from the hall. Courtesy Walter Brune, © Ernst
3.13  Hans Scharoun, Ferdinand Möller House Deyhle, Stuttgart
(author’s photograph)
5.3  Page spread from Deutsche Bauzeitschrift vol. 6,
3.14  Hans Scharoun, Ferdinand Möller House 1969, article on Haus Heimsoeth. Photographer Ernst
(author’s photograph) Deyhle. Courtesy Deutsche Bauzeitschrift

3.15  Hans Scharoun, Ferdinand Möller House 5.4  Page spread from Deutsche Bauzeitschrift vol. 6,
(author’s photograph) 1969, article on Haus Heimsoeth. Photographer Ernst
Deyhle. Courtesy Deutsche Bauzeitschrift
3.16  Hans Scharoun, Ferdinand Möller House
(author’s photograph) 5.5  Page spread from Deutsche Bauzeitschrift vol. 6,
1969, article on Haus Heimsoeth. Photographer Ernst
3.17  Günter Behnisch and Partners, architects, Deyhle. Courtesy Deutsche Bauzeitschrift
Eichstätt University Library, 1988 (author’s photograph)
5.6  Gerhard Schwab (photographer), architect’s
house and studio, Stuttgart, 1953, architect Klaus
4  ‘At Home’ with the Eameses Gessler. View from the street. Courtesy Klaus Gessler

4.1  Julius Shulman (photographer), Charles and 5.7  Gerhard Schwab (photographer), Gessler house
Ray Eames in the living room of Case Study House and studio. View from private courtyard. Courtesy
#8, 1958. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Klaus Gessler
 List Of Figures xi

5.8  Quelle-Fertighaus-Fibel: Vom glücklichen Wohnen 7.2  Heidi Specker, Concrete – Queen Elizabeth Hall,
(Quelle-Prefab Happy Home Primer), 1962, cover. 2003. © Heidi Specker
Photograph by K. Eckert and H. Kümmerl, architect
Edgar Berge 7.3  Heidi Specker, Concrete – Queen Elizabeth Hall,
2003. © Heidi Specker
5.9  K. Eckert and H. Kümmerl (photographers),
Quelle-Bungalow, 1962, architect Edgar Berge. 7.4  Eugène Atget, La cour du Dragon, Paris, 1913
Interior view
7.5  Marc Atkins, Last Day / London, 1998. © Marc Atkins
5.10  Karl Hugo Schmölz (photographer), Haus Gold,
7.6  André Breton, Nadja (English edition), pp58–9
Cologne, 1958, architect Joachim Schürmann. View
with Plate 17, The Humanité bookstore, photograph by
from garden. Courtesy Joachim Schürmann, © Wim
Jacques Andre Boiffard
Cox, Cologne
7.7  Marc Atkins, Westminster Mist / London, 1997.
5.11  Paul Swiridoff (photographer), residence and
© Marc Atkins
reception building of the German Federal Chancellor
(the Kanzlerbungalow), Bonn, 1964, architect Sep Ruf. 7.8  Marc Atkins, Shadow Street / Warsaw, 2005. © Marc
View from park. © Archiv/Museum Würth, Künzelsau Atkins
5.12  Paul Swiridoff (photographer), 7.9.  Marc Atkins, Tram Bridge / Warsaw, 2005. © Marc
Kanzlerbungalow. Interior view. © Archiv/Museum Atkins
Würth, Künzelsau
7.10  Rut Blees Luxemburg, FAUST 2, 2005. © Rut
5.13  Page spread from Wolfgang Leuschner, Bauten Blees Luxemburg
des Bundes 1965–1980, Der Bundesminister für
Raumordnung, Bauwesen und Städtebau (Karlsruhe: 7.11  Rut Blees Luxemburg, A MODERN PROJECT,
C.F. Müller, 1980), showing site plan, exterior view and 1996. © Rut Blees Luxemburg
interior view of the Kanzlerbungalow. Photograph
below by Engelbert Reineke. © vde-Verlag, Offenbach, 7.12  Marc Atkins, Atopos / Łódź, Poland, 2001. © Marc
Germany Atkins

7.13  W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (German edition), pp80–81

6  A Covert Critique of the Architectural
7.14  Heidi Specker, Speckergruppen – Alexanderplatz,
Photograph: The Editorial Practice of 1995–1996. © Heidi Specker
Andrew Mead
7.15  Heidi Specker, Landhaus Lemke, Raum 2, 2008
6.1  Title page of Andrew Mead’s article ‘An eye for (architect: Mies van der Rohe). © Heidi Specker
the undesigned’ on Ann Bousema, The Architects’
Journal, 28 January 1999. (Courtesy of Andrew Mead, 7.16  Heidi Specker, Landhaus Lemke, Raum 3, 2008
Ann Bousema and The Architects’ Journal) (architect: Mies van der Rohe). © Heidi Specker

6.2  Concluding page of Andrew Mead’s article

‘An eye for the undesigned’ on Ann Bousema, The 8  Photography and the Subject of
Architects’ Journal, 28 January 1999. (Courtesy of Architecture
Andrew Mead, Ann Bousema and The Architects’
Journal) 8.1  Eduard Baldus (photographer), The Madeleine,
Paris, 1855. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. © Musée
6.3  Ann Bousema, Zaaneiland, 1998, from the book Carnavalet Roger-Viollet/Topfoto
Zaaneiland (1998). © Ann Bousema
8.2  Eugène Atget, Intérieur d’un Chiffonier, Bvd.
Masséna, 1912. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
7  Haunted Halls of Mirrors: Photography Courtesy of George Eastman House, International
and the Phenomenology of Emotional Space Museum of Photography and Film

7.1  Alfred Stieglitz, The Flat-Iron, 1902–3, Yale 8.3  Thomas Struth, Dey Street, New York, 1978.
Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book Courtesy of Thomas Struth and Marian Goodman
and Manuscript Library Gallery, New York. © Thomas Struth
xii Camera COnstructs

9  ‘The Synoptic View’: Aerial Cooperatives of the USSR), by Le Corbusier and Pierre
Photographs and Twentieth-Century Jeanneret. Plate from L’Architecture Vivante, no. 27,
Spring 1930. Plate 2 in the original. Canadian Centre
Planning
for Architecture, Montréal
9.1  Vertical view of village in northern Greece, from
11.5  Composite model photograph and plans of
E.A. Gutkind, Our World from the Air, Readers Union,
Bush House in London, by Harvey Wiley Corbett. Full
1953, no. 190
page from The Architectural Review, vol. 55, April 1924,
9.2 Oblique view of the Borsig factories, Berlin, from p133. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal
E.A. Gutkind, Our World from the Air, Readers Union,
11.6  Model photograph of the Rockefeller Center
1953, no. 273
in New York City, by Raymond Hood, Harvey Wiley
Corbett, et al. Full page from The Architectural Forum,
9.3  Aerial view of Southwark, Plate 49 from Forshaw
vol. 56, January 1932, p11. Canadian Centre for
and Abercrombie, County of London Plan, 1943, showing
Architecture, Montréal
what were considered ‘defects of present day London’
11.7  Views of the model of the Dymaxion House,
by Richard Buckminster Fuller. Full page from The
10  Negotiating the City Through Google
Architectural Forum, vol. 56, March 1932, p287.
Street View Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal
10.1  View from Google Street View of Charing Cross 11.8  Views of the model of the Dymaxion House,
Road, London, accessed 2010, showing the Astoria by Richard Buckminster Fuller. Full page from The
music venue (http://tinyurl.com/gsvfig1). © Google Architectural Forum, vol. 56, March 1932, p288.
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal
10.2  View from Google Street View of South 5th
Street, Camden, New Jersey, USA, accessed 2010 11.9  Advertisement for the model-making firm
(http://tinyurl.com/gsvfig2). © Google Perfecta. Full page from L‘architecture d‘aujourd’hui,
no. 9, September 1935. Canadian Centre for
10.3  View from Google Street View of Kettledas
Architecture, Montréal
Street, Bethelsdorp, South Africa, accessed 2010
(http://tinyurl.com/gsvfig3). © Google 11.10  Photograph of model of Commonwealth
Promenade apartment building in Chicago, by
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Composite image of
11  Transforming Ideas into Pictures: aerial view of the site including the architectural
Model Photography and Modern model, 1956 (cropped). Photographer: Hedrich-
Architecture Blessing. Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum.
Negative number: HB-19309-C . Canadian Centre for
11.1  Photograph of the model of Lenin Institute and Architecture, Montréal. Gift of Edward Austin Duckett
Library, diploma project by Ivan Leonidov. Full page
from Sovremennaia Arkhitektura, no. 4–5, 1927, p119.
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal 12  Worlds Collide: Reality to Model to
Reality
11.2  Illustrations of paper models made at the
Bauhaus, with photographs by Erich Consemüller. 12.1  Sir Edwin Lutyens, architect, Liverpool Catholic
Double spread from Bauhaus, no. 2–3, 1928, pp4–5. Cathedral model, 1933. Courtesy: National Conservation
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal Centre. Courtesy of National Museums Liverpool

11.3  Model photographs and plans of House for an 12.2  Sir Edwin Lutyens, architect, Liverpool Catholic
Artist, by Theo van Doesburg, Cornelis van Eesteren, Cathedral model, interior view, 1933. Courtesy:
Gerrit Rietveld. Plate from L’Architecture Vivante, no. 9, National Conservation Centre. Courtesy of National
Fall 1925. Plate 2 in the original. Canadian Centre for Museums Liverpool
Architecture, Montréal
12.3 Olivo Barbieri, Site Specific: Rome 04 (1), 2004.
11.4.  Views of the model of the Centrosoyuz Courtesy: Olivio Barbieri and the Yancey Richardson
building in Moscow (Central Office of the Union of Gallery
 List Of Figures xiii

12.4 Olivo Barbieri, Site Specific: Los Angeles 05 (2), 13.9  Unidentified photojournalist, Gonzales Rubiera,
2005. Courtesy: Olivio Barbieri and the Yancey from Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba. Plate 28 in the
Richardson Gallery original

12.5 Olivo Barbieri, Site Specific: LOS ANGELES 05 (1), 13.10  Unidentified photojournalist, Terrorist Students
2005. Courtesy: Olivio Barbieri and the Yancey in Jail, from Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba. Plate 30
Richardson Gallery in the original

12.6  Julia Fullerton-Batten, Floating In Harbour, 13.11  Cover and endpapers, Carleton Beals, The
from the Teenage Stories series, 2005. Courtesy: Julia Crime of Cuba
Fullerton
13.12  Walker Evans, Newsboys, from Carleton Beals,
12.7  Julia Fullerton-Batten, Bike Accident, from the The Crime of Cuba. Plate 29 in the original
Teenage Stories series, 2005. Courtesy: Julia Fullerton-
Batten 13.13  Walker Evans, Wallwriting, from Carleton Beals,
The Crime of Cuba. Plate 31 in the original
12.8  Julia Fullerton-Batten, Marbles, from the
Teenage Stories series, 2005. Courtesy: Julia Fullerton-
Batten 14  Leafing Through Los Angeles:
Edward Ruscha’s Photographic Books
12.9  Peter Garfield, Mobile Home (Communique),
1997. Art © Peter Garfield/Licensed by VAGA, New 14.1  Ed Ruscha, Detail of EVERY BUILDING ON
York, NY THE SUNSET STRIP, 1966. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy
Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert
12.10  Peter Garfield, Mobile Home (Trespass), 1997.
McKeever
Art © Peter Garfield/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
14.2  Ed Ruscha, ‘Pershing Square underground lot,
5th & Hill’, from THIRTYFOUR PARKING LOTS, 1967.
13  Our Man in Havana: Walker Evans’
© Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography
Photographs for The Crime of Cuba by Robert McKeever
13.1  Walker Evans, Street Corner [Luyanó/Malecón
14.3  Ed Ruscha, EVERY BUILDING ON THE SUNSET
route], from Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba. Plate 10
STRIP, 1966, view of entire book. © Ed Ruscha.
in the original
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert
McKeever
13.2  Walker Evans, Parque Central I [Las Murallas],
from Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba. Plate 6 in the
14.4  Ed Ruscha, ‘(Top) Van Nuys Police lot, (Bottom)
original
Public Parking, Van Nuys county Bldg. Multi-level’, from
13.3  Walker Evans, Cinema, from Carleton Beals, The THIRTYFOUR PARKING LOTS, 1967. © Ed Ruscha.
Crime of Cuba. Plate 8 in the original Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert
McKeever
13.4  Walker Evans, Beggar, from Carleton Beals, The
Crime of Cuba. Plate 9 in the original 14.5  Ed Ruscha, detail of EVERY BUILDING ON
THE SUNSET STRIP, 1966. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy
13.5  Walker Evans, Family, from Carleton Beals, The Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert
Crime of Cuba. Plate 11 in the original McKeever

13.6  Walker Evans, Public Spectacle, from Carleton

Beals, The Crime of Cuba. Plate17 in the original 15  Looking for the Affect of History in
the Photographic Work of Bernd and
13.7  Walker Evans, Havana Street, from Carleton
Hilla Becher
Beals, The Crime of Cuba. Plate 1 in the original
15.1  Bernd and Hilla Becher, Blast Furnace, Hainer
13.8  Walker Evans, Patrol, from Carleton Beals, The
Hütte, Siegen, Germany, 1961, Black and white
Crime of Cuba. Plate 27 in the original
photograph. © Hilla Becher, 2012
xiv Camera COnstructs

15.2  August Sander, Vagrants, 1929, Black and white study, 1928, gelatin silver print, gift of the architect,
photograph. © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK MOMA NY. Digital image © 2012, The Museum of
Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Köln/VG Bild- Modern Art/Scala, Florence
Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London, 2012
19.3  Hedrich-Blessing (photographer), Mies van
der Rohe, Holabird & Root associated architects:
16  Order Out of Chaos: Josef Koudelka’s Metallurgical Research Building of Armour Research
Photographic Constructs Foundation, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago,
Illinois, 1943. Chicago History Museum
16.1  Josef Koudelka, California, USA, 1991. © Josef
Koudelka/Magnum Photos 19.4  Diener & Diener Architects, La Baloise
administration building, Basel, 1987. Photomontage,
16.2  Josef Koudelka, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, office of Diener & Diener
1987. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos
19.5  Tom Bisig © (photographer), Diener & Diener,
16.3  Josef Koudelka, Paris, France, 1990. © Josef La Baloise administration building, Basel, 1993
Koudelka/Magnum Photos
19.6  Mies van der Rohe, George Danforth
and William Priestley, delineators. Resor House:
17  Slow Spaces photomontage collage with reproduction of Paul
Klee’s Colourful Meal, 1939. Graphite, wood veneer,
17.1  Michael Wesely, 29 July 1996 – 29 July 1997, colour reproduction and gelatin silver print on
Office of Helmut Friedel. Reproduced with kind illustration board, MOMA NY. Digital image © 2012,
permission of Michael Wesely The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence

19.7  Eileen Gray (architect and photographer),

18  Material Immateriality: Moholy- Tempe à Pailla, Castellar, view from terrace towards
Nagy’s Search for Space surroundings, 1934. National Museum of Ireland,
Dublin
18.1  László Moholy-Nagy, photogram, 1943,
vintage print. © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin 19.8  Eileen Gray (architect and photographer),
apartment, Rue Bonaparte, Paris, view of main salon.
18.2  László Moholy-Nagy, photogram, 1923.
National Museum of Ireland, Dublin
© Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

18.3  László Moholy-Nagy, photogram, vintage print

20  Memorability as Image: The New
(no date). © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin
Brutalism and Photography
18.4  László Moholy-Nagy, Fotogramm ohne Titel –
20.1  Nigel Henderson (photographer), Hunstanton
Fotogluckwunsch (Photogram without title – Photo
greeting card), 1928. © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin School, architects Alison and Peter Smithson:
construction site photographed c.1952. Henderson
Family Trust
19  Framing the View: The Real and the
20.2  Parallel of Life and Art exhibition installation,
Imaginary in Photographic Depictions of
Institute of Contemporary Arts London, 1952.
the Architectural Work of Mies van der Henderson Family Trust
Rohe and Eileen Gray
20.3  Nigel Henderson, Bombed out house, Bethnal
19.1  Mies van der Rohe, IIT campus: photomontage Green, London, 1952. Henderson Family Trust
aerial view showing model within Near South Side,
1947. Photographer: Hedrich-Blessing. MOMA NY. 20.4  Nigel Henderson, Milk bottle fragments,
Digital image © 2012, The Museum of Modern Art/ photogram, c.1950. Henderson Family Trust
Scala, Florence
20.5  Nigel Henderson, Head of a Man, collage, in This is
19.2  Mies van der Rohe, bank and office building Tomorrow exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery London, 1956.
project, Hindenburgplatz, Stuttgart. Photomontage Henderson Family Trust
 List Of Figures xv

20.6  Nigel Henderson, Street, east London, c.1951. 21.11  Diagrammatic representation of the layered
Henderson Family Trust space experienced in Roger Fenton’s stereoscopic
photograph Rocks in the Llugwy, from James Bridge
20.7  Nigel Henderson, Wall, Bow, London, c.1951. Davidson, The Conway in the Stereoscope, 1860. Drawn
Henderson Family Trust by the author

21.12  Roger Fenton (photographer), The Mineral

21  In Defence of Pictorial Space: Gallery, British Museum, from The Stereoscopic
Stereoscopic Photography and Magazine, 1859. Courtesy of George Eastman House,
Architecture in the Nineteenth Century International Museum of Photography and Film

21.1  The reflecting stereoscope, from Charles 21.13  Roger Fenton (photographer), The Egyptian
Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the Physiology of Saloon, British Museum, from The Stereoscopic
Vision – Part the First’, 1838 Magazine, 1859. Courtesy of George Eastman House,
International Museum of Photography and Film
21.2  The reflecting stereoscope. Diagram
illustrating the use of mirrors to present separate 21.14  Roger Fenton (photographer), Interior of
images to each eye. Drawn by the author the New Museum, Oxford, from The Stereoscopic
Magazine, 1859. Courtesy of George Eastman House,
21.3  Stereoscopic drawings, from Charles International Museum of Photography and Film
Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the Physiology of
Vision – Part the First ‘, 1838
22  Stereoscopy and the Architecture of
21.4  The lenticular stereoscope, from Sir David Visual Space
Brewster, The Stereoscope, its History, Theory and
Construction, 1856 22.1  Peter Paul Rubens, putti demonstrating the
‘horopter’, copperplate from François de Aguilon,
21.5  The lenticular stereoscope. Diagram Opticorum libri sex philosophis juxta ac mathemacticis
illustrating the use of lenses to displace the apparent utiles (Antwerp: Ex officina Plantiniana, apud Viduam
position of each of the photographic images, from et filios J. Moreti, 1613), p195
Sir David Brewster, The Stereoscope, its History, Theory
and Construction, 1856 22.2  Penelope Haralambidou, superimposition of
To Be Looked at… on a detail of the Large Glass, digital
21.6  Roger Fenton (photographer), The Egyptian image, 2011
Saloon, British Museum, from The Stereoscopic
Cabinet, no. II, December 1859. Courtesy of 22.3  Marcel Duchamp, Handmade Stereopticon Slide,
George Eastman House, International Museum of pencil over photographic stereopticon slide, 1918. The
Photography and Film Museum of Mordern Art, New York. © Succession Marcel
Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011
21.7  Roger Fenton, Rocks in the Llugwy, from James
Bridge Davidson’s The Conway in the Stereoscope, 22.4  Penelope Haralambidou, Stereoscopic Pair of
1860. © The British Library Board (10369.d.7) Given, stereo-photograph, 2000

21.8  Stereoscopic drawing, from Charles 22.5  Marcel Duchamp, Cheminée anaglyphe
Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the Physiology of (Anaglyphic Chimney), anaglyphic drawing, blue and
Vision – Part the First ‘, 1838 red colour pencil on cardboard, 1968. Collection
Arturo Schwarz, Milan. © Succession Marcel
21.9  Antonio Canova, Funerary monument to Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011
Maria Christina of Austria, c.1800. Photograph by the
author 22.6.  Double spread from H. Vuibert, Les Anaglyphes
Géométriques (Paris: Librairie Vuibert, 1912), pp26–7
21.10  Roger Fenton (photographer), The Terrace
and Park, Harewood House, 1861. From the collection 22.7  Man Ray, Le Dernier Oeuvre de Duchamp/
of The Royal Photographic Society at the National Cheminée Anaglyphe, 1968. Private Collection, New
Media Museum. Courtesy of the Science & Society York. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
Picture Library London 2011
xvi Camera COnstructs

22.8  Penelope Haralambidou, Constellations, mixed 23.5  Nat Chard, photograph of J.P. Wilson’s Cold Bog
media on stereo-photographs, 1999 Diorama by one of the bog cameras

22.9  Penelope Haralambidou, The Blossoming of 23.6  Nat Chard, dioramascopes to research the
Perspective, composite drawing, 2006 projective method J.P. Wilson used in his Mule Deer
Diorama at the American Museum of Natural History
22.10  Penelope Haralambidou, Exposure, anaglyphic in New York
projection, 2001
23.7  Nat Chard, diorama shell photograms from the
22.11  Penelope Haralambidou, The Act of Looking, dioramascopes in Figure 23.6
steel, perspex, waxed thread and nickel silver, 2007.
Photograph: Andy Keate, 2009 23.8  Nat Chard, Drawing Instrument No. 1

23.9  Nat Chard, Drawing Instrument No. 2 shown

23  Photography as an Agent of with a set of photographic drawings. Photograph:
Architectural Proposition and Provocation Robert Bean

23.1  Array of cameras to witness psychic activity, set 23.10  Nat Chard, Drawing Instrument No. 3
up in a dedicated room in Dr. T.G. Hamilton’s house at
23.11  Nat Chard, two of the four versions of Drawing
185 Kelvin Street, Winnipeg. Courtesy of University of
Instrument No. 5.
Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, Hamilton
Family Fonds pc012_A79-041_009_0001_005_0001 23.12  Nat Chard, Drawing Instrument No. 4

23.2  Plan of psychic research room in Dr. T.G. 23.13  Nat Chard, high-speed photographs of paint
Hamilton’s house. Courtesy of University of Manitoba in flight from Instruments Nos 4 and 5
Archives and Special Collections, Hamilton Family
Fonds pc012_A79-041_009_0001_006_0001 23.14  Nat Chard, test track for a bird automaton

23.3  A medium producing ectoplasm. Stereoscopic 23.15  Nat Chard, aerial view of bird automaton track
photograph taken by Dr. T.G. Hamilton. Courtesy
of University of Manitoba Archives and Special 23.16  Nat Chard, Drawing Instrument No. 6
Collections, Hamilton Family Fonds pc012_A79-
23.17  Nat Chard, stereoscopic photograph of
041_009_0007_019_0001
shadow from Drawing Instrument No. 6
23.4  Nat Chard, view of two cameras specific to J.P.
Wilson’s diorama of a cold bog in Connecticut
Notes on Contributors

Professor Peter Blundell Jones’s career has been divided between practice, criticism and
teaching, with an increasing emphasis on architectural history and theory. After teaching
at Cambridge and South Bank University in London he became Professor of Architecture at
the University of Sheffield in 1994. His monograph on Hans Scharoun of 1978 was followed
by others on Hugo Häring, Gunnar Asplund, Günter Behnisch and Peter Hübner. He has also
published two volumes of Modern Architecture Through Case Studies and written extensively for
The Architectural Review.

Dr Ben Campkin is Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory in the Bartlett School of
Architecture, UCL, and Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. He is co-editor of Dirt: New
Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (2007), and has recently published articles in
journals including The Journal of Architecture and Architectural Design, and in anthologies
including Urban Constellations (2011), The Politics of Making (2007) and Critical Cities (2009). He
is currently writing a history of regeneration in London, to be published in 2013. 

Professor Nat Chard is Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at the University
of Manitoba. He was previously Professor at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, and
has also taught in London at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and the Universities of
East London and North London, and practiced as an architect. He has lectured, published and
exhibited internationally.

Dr Davide Deriu is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Westminster. His work has
appeared in publications including The Journal of Architecture, Architectural Theory Review and
The London Journal, as well as various edited books on architecture and urbanism. He curated
the exhibition ‘Modernism in Miniature: Points of View’ at the Canadian Centre for Architecture
(2011).

Rosamund Diamond established her practice Diamond Architects in 1995. She teaches part-
time on a Masters programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and has contributed
essays to magazines including werk, bauen + wohnen and Architecture Today, and has edited
several books including From City to Detail: Diener & Diener (1992) with Wilfried Wang, with
whom she was editor of the journal 9H.
xviii Camera COnstructs

Richard Difford is Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Westminster,
London. In his role as course director for the MA Architecture and Digital Media course, and as
a tutor in architectural history and theory, he continues to explore an interest in representation
and computing that began during his time as a student of Robin Evans.

Carola Ebert is an architect and researcher currently teaching at the BTU Cottbus and the
Technische Universität Berlin, and completing her PhD thesis on postwar German architecture.
Her work has been presented at various academic conferences and published internationally,
most recently in dérive (2012) and at the EAHN 2012 conference.

Professor William Firebrace is an architect and writer, and teaches film and architecture at the
University of Westminster. He has recently published Marseille Mix (2010), Eyes Aquatic (2011)
and Hop Rayuela Backstein (2012), and is currently working on Memo for Nemo, a study of the
undersea in documentary and fiction.

Dr Penelope Haralambidou is Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where

she coordinates the MPhil/PhD Architectural Design. Her work lies between architectural
design, art practice and critical theory, and has been exhibited internationally. She is author
and editor of The Blossoming of Perspective: A Study (2007) and author of Marcel Duchamp
and the Architecture of Desire (forthcoming), and has contributed writing to a wide range of
publications.

Dr Andrew Higgott has taught the history and theory of architecture both at the Architectural
Association School and the University of East London, where he has run a Masters course
on architectural theory for the last 15 years. Publications include studies of the architectural
photographers Frank Yerbury and Eric de Maré, both published by the Architectural Association.
His book Mediating Modernism: Architectural Cultures in Britain (2007) examines the history of
the Modernist architectural culture of Great Britain through an analysis of its most influential
books and journals.

Dr Tanis Hinchcliffe has recently retired as Reader in Architectural History at the University
of Westminster. She has published on aspects of French and English architecture from
the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and her work focusses on the interface between
architecture and wider culture. Her most recent book is Discovering London’s Buildings with
John Bold (2009).

Dr Steven Jacobs is an art historian specializing in visualizations of architecture, cities and

landscape in film and photography and the relations between film and the visual arts. His
publications include The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (2007) and Framing
Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (2011). He currently teaches at the Department of Art History at
the University of Ghent in Belgium.

Dr Mark Morris teaches architectural design and theory at Cornell University where he is
Director of Graduate Studies in Architecture. Winner of an AIA Medal for Excellence in the
Study of Architecture, he has previously taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL,
the Architectural Association and the University of North Carolina. His essays have featured
 NOtes On COntributOrs xix

in Frieze, Contemporary, Cabinet, AD and Domus. He is author of Models: Architecture and the
Miniature (2007) and Automatic Architecture: Designs from the Fourth Dimension (2006).

Andrzej Piotrowski is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, the University of

Minnesota. Educated as an architect in Poland, he practiced architecture in that country and
in the United States. He is the co-editor, with Julia Williams Robinson, of The Discipline of
Architecture (2000) and the author of Architecture of Thought (2011).

Rebecca Ross is an academic researcher and graphic designer with interests in urbanism,
interaction and media, and is Senior Lecturer and Interaction Design Subject Leader on the
Graphic Communication Design Programme at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
She is currently a PhD Candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Rachel Stevenson is a practising architect and exhibition designer. Whilst at Future Systems
she worked on projects including the Lord’s Media Centre and the Marni shops, and at
Metaphor on the exhibition design for the Ashmolean Museum. She has taught architectural
design at the University of East London, Portsmouth University and at the Bartlett, UCL,
where she also co-edited Bartlett Works (2003). She currently teaches Architectural History
at the Bartlett.

Edward Whittaker is a photographer and writer currently undertaking doctoral research at

the University of East London. He is the author of ‘Art in the Age of Exception: Mark Wallinger’s
Sleeper in Berlin’ in REVOLUTIONS: Mapping Culture, Community, and Change from Ben Jonson
to Angela Carter edited by Jennifer Craig and Warren Steele (2009). He is editor of Painting with
Architecture in Mind (2012).

Ian Wiblin teaches photography and film at the University of Glamorgan and was Kettle’s Yard
Artist-in-Residence at the University of Cambridge in 1995. His exhibitions include Recovered
Territory, The New Art Gallery Walsall (2007). His work with video, pursued in collaboration with
Anthea Kennedy, includes the feature length piece Stella Polare (2006) and the forthcoming The
View From Our House. His publications include Night Watch (1996). He was a contributor to the
book Cinema and Architecture (1997).

Dr Robin Wilson is a writer on architecture, art and landscape. He teaches on history and
theory programmes at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and is a visiting design tutor
at Bristol and Nottingham Schools of Architecture. He completed a PhD at the Bartlett in
2007, and has contributed widely to the architectural press, including The Architects’
Journal, The Architectural Review and Blueprint. He also works in the collaborative art practice
Photolanguage exploring experimental approaches to the documentation of architecture
and urban space.

Dr Ivana Wingham trained as an architect and is now engaged in full-time interdisciplinary

academic research. Her doctoral thesis from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, was
supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant and she was recently awarded
the Wingate Scholarship. She is currently Architecture Programme Leader at the University of
Brighton and working on Mobility of the Line, to be published in 2012.
xx Camera COnstructs

Professor Mary N. Woods is Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory at Cornell

University. Her books include From Craft to Profession: Architectural Practice in 19th-Century
America (1999) and most recently Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs of the American Built
Environment (2009). She is currently working on a book about women architects in Mumbai
and Delhi.

Timothy Wray is an architect, writer and photographer currently based in Zurich. He was
previously Senior Lecturer in History of Architecture at the University of East London. He has
contributed to publications including Bartlett Works (2003), the Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary
World Architecture, the RIBA Journal, Il Giornale dell’architettura and mined magazine.
Preface

This book has evolved from a conference organized by the editors, also titled Camera
Constructs, which took place in the School of Architecture and the Visual Arts at the University
of East London in April 2006. The conference featured a wide range of academic papers as
well as incorporating a number of contributions by significant artist-photographers including
Hélène Binet, Rut Blees Luxemburg and Marc Atkins, and an exhibition and workshops led by
practitioners. The range and depth of material presented testified to the fascination that the
photography of architecture and the city exert, and to the scope of the research and creative
experimentation that it continues to inspire.
This volume, based on a core of papers first given at the conference, with further invited
contributions, is intended to feature some of the most original and interesting contemporary
research into this field, and to contribute to further discourse in this richly rewarding subject
area. While valuable historical surveys of architectural photography have been published, the
editors believe that no existing volume attempts to bring together focused writing on the
much wider and varied interaction of photographic, architectural, urban and media practices
that is explored here. The book is not intended as a historical survey or as a comprehensive
overview of the subject – indeed the creative synergies it discusses would be almost impossible
to summarize in one volume. Instead it offers a number of case studies which analyse rather
than recount the significance of particular bodies of work. They enable the reader to see these
particular practices in the light of larger issues, and while the book has an Anglo-American
emphasis in its subject matter that reflects the specialisms of the contributors, it serves to
illustrate the key issues and fault lines in thinking on the subject at large.
We are very grateful to the contributors for their involvement, patience during the editing
process and the product of their research. Almost all hold academic posts at universities in Great
Britain, the USA and elsewhere; some also develop their practice as artists or architects. It was
not possible to incorporate all of the contributions to the original conference into this volume
with its more academic emphasis; nevertheless everybody who participated in the event
helped to influence this book and inform and broaden the editors’ approach, and we would
like to thank all who helped make it such a success. The support of the School of Architecture
and the Visual Arts in setting up the conference was essential, and we would like in particular to
thank Sian Harris, Ralph Hall, and other members of UEL staff.
Andrew Higgott would like to thank Timothy Wray for his constant energy, application and
intellect as well as practical ideas throughout the work on the book and predecessor conference.
xxii Camera COnstructs

He would also like to thank colleagues and former students both at the University of East
London and the Architectural Association, including Nicholas Weaver, Renée Tobe, Valerie
Bennett, Katie Lloyd Thomas, Rose Jackson and Rikke Larsen, as well as Ciro de Lima and Silvio
Tosatti.
Timothy Wray would like to thank Andrew Higgott for his inspired idea to hold the Camera
Constructs conference and produce this publication, for inviting him to become involved,
and for his astute guidance of both projects. He would also like to thank Tim Lee and Mike
Fitzgerald for their support and patience whilst he took time out from working at Lee/Fitzgerald
Architects to help organize the conference, his parents for their support and encouragement,
and Iain Borden, Jane Rendell and Barbara Penner for their help with earlier versions of his own
chapters.
The editors would like to thank Valerie Rose and Emily Ruskell, Editors at Ashgate, for
taking on such a large and complex project, and for their encouragement, patience and support
during its production.
Introduction: Architectural and
Photographic Constructs
Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray

Architecture perceived through photography

From the very earliest days of its invention, the photographic medium has had a particular
resonance with architectural subject matter. In the pioneering days of photography the
relationship was to some extent born of necessity, buildings being one of the few subjects that
would withstand long exposures, but the affinity goes much deeper, photography seemingly
having a unique ability to explore and represent architectural space and form, and even to
express fundamental architectural ideas and concepts. It is the nature of this relationship,
to some extent reciprocal, but with far more profound implications upon the practice and
conception of architecture, that is explored in this volume. Alongside the kind of photography
used in mainstream architectural publishing, a richly diverse range of creative photographic
engagements with architectural subject matter is to be found, including artists’ work, the
increasingly prominent role of architecture in advertising and lifestyle photography, and
architects’ own experiments with alternative forms of representation and roles of photography
in the design process. Photography is also fundamental in shaping our understanding of the
modern city and in urban design practices.
Buildings and urban scenes were frequently used subject matter in the earliest photographs:
Henry Fox Talbot’s book of photographs The Pencil of Nature1 included images of Westminster
Abbey and the streets of Paris. Many early studies of architecture took on the role of accurately
recording historic buildings, such as Gothic Cathedrals and Egyptian temples. Already at this
early stage the photograph can be seen to have become implicated in the design process, as
in an era that obsessively aped historic building styles, it provided a seemingly unquestionable
detailed record of historic precedents superseding the earlier use of published engravings as
design sources. Figures such as John Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc seized on its use as a tool in the
restoration of ancient buildings; but architects and their clients also realized its usefulness for
documenting and publicizing projects and by the late nineteenth century a thriving business
in the photography of new architecture had been established in many industrialized countries.
2 Camera COnstructs

It was, however, the remarkable explosion of creative photographic work of the 1920s and
30s accompanying the advent of architectural Modernism that gave rise to what we would
recognize as a distinctive practice of architectural photography, and aligned the medium with
progressive new architecture and the radical desire to rebuild the city (as discussed in Sections I
and II of this volume). The empathy and creative synergy between the new architecture and the
new photography resulted in the architecture of modernity being conceived and propagated in
photographic terms as place and form defined by light. The camera has had a profound impact
upon the evolution of modernity and how architecture is imagined and, indeed, constructed.
Architecture and photography combined to construct the contemporary identity of the house,
the workplace and the city. Historic or traditionally designed buildings, of course, continued
to form as frequent and legitimate a subject for photography as the new architecture, but the
dynamic between Modernist architecture and the expressive new photography enjoyed a
particularly fruitful creative synergy, and, more significantly, caused a distinct shift in sensibility,
affecting how all architecture and the city as an entirety were represented and imagined.
Photography did not simply document built works: it was employed in the processes of
surveying, conceptualizing, passing judgement on and planning the city; in state propaganda,
advertising and architectural manifestos; in architectural and planning education; and as a
creative tool within design processes.
In an era that exalted science and empiricism, the photograph’s apparent truthfulness was
compelling but ambiguous in its effects. One starting point for this book’s multiple strands
of enquiry is the idea that the photograph represents the pure and ideological stage of the
Modernist architectural project. Equally, however, it can be claimed that the narrowness of
the photographic vision has had a powerfully negative impact upon the way architecture is
understood and developed. Only some of the qualities of architecture can be communicated
in the photograph: the properties of space, materiality and the day-to-day inhabitation of
buildings are notoriously difficult to represent photographically. The medium favours and
promotes an abstracted vision of architecture that assumes far more significance in the
photographic representation than in built reality.
Architecture’s use of photography is one of its most fundamental practices, and
yet whereas art criticism has intensively studied and challenged the medium’s seeming
truthfulness, a virtual taboo exists on critical or self-reflexive enquiry into its conventions, use
and impact within mainstream architectural discourse. Photographs seem to have the force
of evidence: they are taken to be unmediated conveyors of architectural experience. The ways
in which architecture is imagined and discussed are dependent on its image in photography,
used and reproduced in many different contexts – in various media, in architectural education
and professional discourse. Photographic encounters with architecture may have become
far more significant than physical ones: one ramification is evident in the way in which
architectural history is written and taught. The comparison of photographs of very diverse
buildings has become one of the principal narratives of architectural design discourse, and
the international dissemination of photography is undoubtedly largely responsible not only
for local building traditions being discarded in favour of more compelling forms imported
from elsewhere, but also for concealing the inappropriateness of many of the imported ideas –
either because failings in the original were not evident in the photographs, or because
photography suggests that a design idea whose original environmental and social context
is suppressed can be imported from France to Brazil as cleanly as cutting a photograph from
one context and pasting it into another.
 IntrOductiOn 3

Robin Evans’ essay on the relationship of the architectural drawing to its subject2 argued
that a great misunderstanding had developed from the identification of the drawing and
the architectural object; and further, that this error had led to the practice of drawing and its
particular properties being left unexamined. Photography, given its seeming transparency, is
even more insidious in its effects. The identification of the architectural photograph with its
subject is, for the most part, complete. It is all but taken for granted that a series of photographs
of a building can make sense of and adequately represent the complex experience of
encountering and occupying architecture.
The architectural photograph takes on, then, one of the key properties ascribed to the
photographic medium: an assumption of truth, that there is a direct equivalence between it as
an image and the building itself. As Roland Barthes has written in Camera Lucida, his essay on the
nature of the photograph, ’whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph
is always invisible, it is not it that we see.’3 A photograph of a person is that person: a photograph
of a building is seen to represent that building in its totality. As Barthes argues however, the
photograph is not ‘taken’, as in common parlance, but made: the camera’s subject, viewpoint
and framing are those of the photographer. The basis of the photograph in the observable
nevertheless lends it an authenticity: its assumption of truth is seen to furnish evidence, as if its
images are objective and definitive, rather than the product of a process.
Questioning the issues created by the identification of the architectural photograph with
its subject is one of the fundamental themes underlying the enquiry of this book. The strikingly
diverse range of photographic representations of architecture in various artistic, documentary
and design practices would already seem to undermine any steady view about the nature of the
photograph. One only needs to compare photographs of the same building taken by different
photographers to immediately highlight the simple fact that photography offers a selective
view of architecture and constructs its own narratives of it. Conventional histories of the
photography of architecture have, however, arguably failed to adequately contextualize and
analyse this wide range of activity, and architectural discourse and practice have suffered from
their failure to engage with or fully exploit the creative potential afforded by the interaction of
these alternative approaches. Art practices greatly broaden the scope and critical possiblities
of photography, and question and contextualize cultural representations of architecture. One
of the aims of this book is, accordingly, to shake up the often unquestioning approach to the
subject by bringing together case studies exploring diverse and often divergent practices (as
discussed in Sections III and IV).
In Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilém Flusser argues that humankind has been
fundamentally altered by the advent of photography: ‘man forgets that he produces images
in order to find his way in the world; he now tries to find his way in images.’4 Everything
in the world now desires to be recorded, ‘to flow into this eternal memory, and to become
eternally reproducible there. The result is that every event or action loses its proper historical
character, tending to become a magic ritual, an eternally repeated motion.’5 Photography and
the modes of discourse that it institutes pervade contemporary architectural practice. At its
most profound, the conception and practice of architecture has been fundamentally altered
by the mode of seeing instituted by the camera. At its most superficial, much contemporary
architecture can be seen to be conceived of, designed and then evaluated almost solely in
terms of photographic imagery, whereby through digital imaging, buildings are designed
around photo-realistic simulations of how they will eventually be made to appear in almost
identical photographs.
4 Camera COnstructs

Through its ubiquitous use in processes of surveying, urban documentation and mapping,
photography has also fundamentally influenced how the city is studied, represented, imagined
and planned. Photographic representations of the city are both decisive in shaping the opinions
of designers, politicians and the public, and frequently used or manipulated to justify decisions
as to the future form that it should take.
The title of this volume, Camera Constructs, thus on the one hand opposes the medium of
photography and the materiality of construction, but on the other can be read as saying that
the camera invariably constructs what it depicts. The photograph is not a simple representation
of an external reality, but constructs its meaning and reconstructs its subject. The starting point
of many of the authors in this book is to analyse this condition and illuminate its processes: the
photographic practices of the artist, of the architect and of the documentarist are each seen to
construct images highly specific in their context and meaning.

Modernist constructs

The 1920s and 30s marked a period of astonishing creative exploration into the medium of
photography led by a small number of photographers in the USA, the Soviet Union and Europe.
In the USA, Edward Weston’s ‘straight photography’ interpreted issues of form without recourse
to given traditions, in the Soviet Union in the wake of the Revolution photographers such as
Rodchenko represented politically-charged subjects in radical new compositions, and above all
in Germany the development of the ‘New Photography’ related to the larger Neue Sachlichkeit6
tendency in German culture. The plain geometrical surfaces, light-filled interiors and stark
contrasts of the pioneering Modernist architecture particularly lent themselves to a dynamic
new photography that learnt from and emulated its formal language. In the work of Werner
Mantz, for example, an exact vision was realized that transformed new buildings into strikingly
abstract forms. Aerial views were decisive in forming an often highly negative impression of
the seeming chaos of the modern urban environment, and in suggesting that the architect
or planner, with the benefit of this God-like view of a miniaturized world, was in a position to
sweep it away and replace it with their vision of a more rational, designed future (see Chapter 9
by Tanis Hinchcliffe). The widespread use of model photography to represent architectural
concepts at their pure design stage extended these practices (see Chapter 11 by Davide Deriu).
In an era of revolutionary political and cultural ambitions, photography could also provide
imagery that represented the new society that would inhabit the new architecture and the
new city: it could demonstrate how its architecture would be occupied and used. New, lighter
and more adaptable cameras and more sensitive and robust films encouraged a significant
increase in the scope of photography at large, accompanied by advances in printing techniques
that allowed photographs and text to be printed together, prompting innovative new graphic
design and developing new audiences. Many of the conventions in the practice and techniques
through which architecture is still represented in photography arose in this pioneering period.
Beatriz Colomina, in her writing on the architectural photograph, has argued that its
evolution mirrored that of the new architectural syntheses of Modernism, and that modern
architecture can only be understood in relation to its engagement with the mass media. In her
book Privacy and Publicity7 she has forcefully argued that the real site of modern architecture
is not a series of obscure buildings in inconvenient locations, but the photograph, or more
specifically the published photograph. Earlier, Reyner Banham had argued that Modernism
 IntrOductiOn 5

was the first movement in the history of art based exclusively on ‘photographic evidence’ rather
than on personal experience, drawings or conventional books.8 Colomina elaborates that ‘he was
referring to the fact that the industrial buildings that became icons for the modern movement
were not known to the architects from ”direct” experience [only from photographs], [and] the
work of these architects themselves has become known almost always through photography
and the printed media.’9
The ramifications of this radical proposition serve to highlight a situation which even
commentators in the 1930s perceived: that of the complicity of the architectural photograph
with its Modernist subject. The ‘new photography’ and the architecture which came to be
known as the International Style both represented a modern aesthetic created in response
to the machine. Their aesthetic and ideological commitments were similar: they were by
implication partners in the same polemical campaign. Instead of a vision of a romantic past,
which had informed much previous photography, now representations of an engineered
future came to the fore. The resulting emphasis on the visual as a means to comprehend
modern architecture suggests that the architectural photograph can be interpreted as a
perversion of a more purposive Modernism. The relationship of photography to Modernism,
and, in the case of architecture, its role in picturing an idealized architecture that scarcely
existed in material form, has provided an extraordinarily flawed reading. The history of the
last century might have developed rather differently if the new photography and the new
architecture had not worked together to such mutual advantage: perhaps the particular
formal language of Modernism, rather than any deeper level of its meaning or realization,
would not have become so pervasive.
This fundamental role of architectural photography in the production and reception
of modern architecture is well documented, as evidenced by various publications from the
period such as Bruno Taut’s 1929 Die neue Baukunst in Europa und Amerika,10 Gustav Platz’s
documentation of Die Baukunst der Neuesten Zeit11 and the Architectural Review under the
editorship of James Richards,12 each characterized by innovative layouts and typography.
Publications from an early stage by leading Modernist architects, Walter Gropius and Erich
Mendelsohn among them, underline the importance of the photographic image in their
work. Much of the photography of this period certainly sought to have a validity beyond that
of being a record of buildings. By the control and selection of images, the architect or editor
publishing them endeavoured to create a polemic: a highly edited view of the possibilities of
the architecture of their time, with aspects of the building concerned presented as evidence.
A new objectivism (in the sense of a focus on their object qualities, their ‘thing-ness’, as Sachlichkeit
can also be translated) was apparent in this ‘New Photography’: buildings were presented as
objects in light, with stark shadows, rigorous symmetry and a disregard of detail and use.
In a passage in his book Painting Photography Film, the Bauhaus publication of 1925, László
Moholy-Nagy described the new way of seeing which he believed would be engendered by
photography:

In the photographic camera we have the most reliable aid to a beginning of objective
vision. Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true, is explicable in its
own terms, is objective, before he can arrive at any possible subjective position. This
will abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern which has remained
unsuperseded for centuries and which has been stamped upon our vision by great
individual painters.13
6 Camera COnstructs

This statement can be seen to express in unadulterated form what other artists and architects of
the early Modernist period assumed to be true: that the camera brought with it the possibility
of creating a truly new art, obliterating the traditions that had shaped the making and meaning
of visual images for centuries – traditions that were not ‘objective’, unlike the supposedly
truthful new medium. Photography seemed to enable artists to create a new relationship with
the world they experienced, and this connection had a utopian drive and purpose. Bringing a
new world into being through its imagery was an essential element of the work of the modern
architect, as it was of the modern photographer.
Not just the favourable representation of the new architecture, but a reconceptualization
of the entire scope and ambitions of architectural practice was at stake; a number of
architects themselves engaged in photographic projects that sought to stake their claim to
the new ground, and legitimize their work by what Robert Elwall describes as a ‘photographic
reappropriation of the past’.14 Le Corbusier’s utilization of a constant editing of images in
such polemic texts as Vers une Architecture, as well as in the publication of his own work,
provides a prototype for its later near-universal application (discussed in Chapter 2 by Andrzej
Piotrowski).
Equally the contemporary city, as the grand site of Modernism’s construction of a
new society, was represented for example in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika,15 with selective
views of Manhattan used to express the new urbanity. Photography provided an effective
and essential tool in the development of the new visual culture of architectural Modernism:
similarly, the transmission of new architecture through its publication established innovatory
practices. The tendency inherent in Modernist architecture to conceive of a building as an
isolated object without any context lent itself to photographic representation. This can be
seen in such paradigmatic buildings as Gropius’s Dessau Bauhaus, itself the subject of many
photographic studies by the Bauhaus’s students:16 both it and the equally canonical Purist
villas of Le Corbusier made an apparently seamless transition from their sites to appear
as objects on the printed page through the means of photographic reproduction.17 Such
precedents established a new relationship and a new model of practice between architecture
and its representation.

Publishing practices

What had started as avant-garde practice very quickly came to be absorbed into commercial
architectural photography, and became established through the photographically illustrated
magazines of the 1930s, setting up a tradition and culture of the photography of architecture,
much of which remains today. The architectural photography of the Modernist period
captured and celebrated buildings as never before, and produced some stunning imagery, to
the mutual benefit of designer, photographer and publisher: a benefit that all were quick to
exploit. Partnerships were often established between leading architects and their favoured
photographers, whose work was eagerly sought out by publishers.
The first coverage of a building is often decisive in establishing its place within the canon
of built works – in many cases a building will only be published once, and its documentation
in a journal remains the definitive analysis. Architectural journals and magazines are thus
instrumental in determining discourse on new architecture, but often seem to be complicit
in advancing the agendas set by architects and represented by photographers. The English
 IntrOductiOn 7

critic Tom Picton has written of the unholy alliance of editor, photographer and architect in
the creation of what he called ‘the craven image.’18 It seemed that the photographer’s job was
only to flatter, and that editors would lose their critical role in relation to the building that the
architect had produced, in the way new architecture was published.
J.M. Richards, editor of the Architectural Review from the 1930s, likewise commented on
photographers he had commissioned: ‘they flattered the buildings they photographed to a
degree that delighted architects but caused me some misgivings’.19 His own editorial agenda
was to establish the grounds for the emergence of a kind of vernacular Modernism, and the
highly formal emphasis of the photography he commissioned created a misleading emphasis,
as he appreciated in retrospect. In Britain, for example, the pictorialist F.R. Yerbury (discussed by
Andrew Higgott in Chapter 1) was replaced by such photographers as Dell and Wainwright,20
who were more attuned to the Modernist vision, and very much influenced by the German ‘new
photography’. Just as in architectural practice Charles Holden’s version of ‘modern’, say, was
replaced by that of Wells Coates or Lubetkin, a new clarity of line and form came to dominate
architectural photography.
The practices of architectural photography evolved and matured in the years after the
Second World War. Perhaps the most significant developments were prompted by the gradual
near-universal adoption of the use of colour in the documentation of new buildings, which
not only allowed photography to convey a fundamental but previously invisible architectural
quality (and revealed many of the iconic Modernist buildings to be vividly coloured, to the
surprise of those who had known them only through black and white representations), but
went hand-in-hand with increasingly widespread imagery published in popular magazines that
presented architecture as framing a contemporary lifestyle – for example with Julius Shulman
representing the Californian Modernist ideal exemplified by the Case Study Programme
(discussed in Chapter 4 by Rachel Stevenson). Photographers such as Ezra Stoller or Hedrich
Blessing produced ‘classic’ images of the heyday of American Modernism. Other developments
included the material and contingent photography of Brutalism (see Chapter 20 by Andrew
Higgott), the emergence of a distinctive Japanese approach, exemplified by Yukio Futagawa,
and the documentation of the implementation of Modernist utopian urban projects. In
more recent decades the advent of digital media and the attendant expansion of publishing
practices, both in print and online, have made architectural photography more accessible than
ever, and fractured what used to be a somewhat specialized realm. Architectural photographs
are prominent in a wide range of magazines, books and websites that have fuelled a greatly
expanded popular interest in architecture and design.
Nevertheless, the tendency of photography to uncritically flatter its architectural
subject matter as identified by Picton and Richards persists, and it must be observed that
the photographic representation of new work in architectural publications has become
largely conventionalized. The practice of architectural photography can, to a large extent, be
characterized by its adherence to a distinct set of conventions. These include dynamic wide-
angle three-quarter views to emphasize a building’s spatial massing; usually photographing
in sunlight such that light and shadows emphasize volumetric form, or at dusk to allow lit
interiors and exterior features to register simultaneously on film that cannot accommodate the
full tonal range of bright sunlight and shadows; and parallax correction so that straight edges
do not appear to curve in the image as a result of lens distortion. Verticals in particular are
typically ‘corrected’ to align with the frame of the image and not perspectivally converge (which
assumes particular importance when one or more images are arranged together on a page).
8 Camera COnstructs

It is also common for interiors to be photographed from selective viewpoints looking through
open doors to suggest layered sequences of space, and leading the eye into the image to
suggest that the building is accessible to the viewer (see Chapter 4 by Carola Ebert and Chapter 5
by Rachel Stevenson for a discussion of specific examples of the structuring of architectural
photographs). The need for architectural journals to present fresh buildings as news, ideally
before their competitors, results in a pressure to photograph buildings immediately after, if not
before, they are completed, and effectively prevents any engagement, either photographically
or journalistically, with issues of occupation and performance over time.
The prejudices of architectural photography are by no means all ideological: some subjects
such as stairwells, linear vistas and views framed by door or window openings simply tend
to photograph well; whereas others such as gardens, assymetrical spaces, unfolding spatial
relationships and juxtapositions of near and distant detail are much harder, if not impossible,
to capture. Furthermore the human eye is very good at evaluating and prioritizing information,
whereas the camera is not selective and registers everything uniformly. Thus the awe-inspiring
first glimpse of a distant monument is hardly registered in the photograph, while the litter
bin in the foreground grabs our attention and seems to be the main subject of the image. The
architectural framing of space in particular is very easily distracted in photographs by ‘visual
clutter’: whereas, to paraphrase Hegel, architecture is usually experienced as a background stage
for life, in architectural photography it must be brought to the foreground, which can only be
achieved when other foregrounding elements are suppressed. Hence it is common for buildings,
and particularly interiors, to be photographed empty and mercilessly tidied, and lit to further
highlight architectural form over signs of inhabitation. The physical difficulty of manoeuvring a
large format camera capable of recording as much of a space as possible within the lens’s angle
of vision also tends to impose the adoption of viewpoints that do not necessarily reflect the
way in which architecture is habitually viewed. The basic properties of the medium thus impose
their own hierarchies of representation and favour certain architectural qualities, premising not
only a particular kind of photography, but also a certain definition of architecture. The resulting
conventions also come to define what it means for that subject to be read as ‘architectural’:
the photographer must compose the photograph in such a way as to make it accord with the
conventions of the practice.
Architecture is thus, for a variety of reasons, typically presented as a fixed, newly completed
and unsullied ideal. In her essay ‘Available for Viewing’, Janet Abrams has persuasively described
the way an architectural journal is likely to present its subject in the best possible light:
‘Architectural photography prepares you only for the optimum condition, not just the building
new-born, pristine, but the building severed neatly from its surroundings, the building always
sunbathing, the building in its warmest hues, smiling for the camera’.21 A visit to a building
previously only known from its photographic representation reveals deceits of scale, context
and condition in the photograph: ‘there are surprises, always ... instead of glowing ... a building
simply stands there, locked into a place’.22
An examination of Abrams’, Picton’s and Richards’ arguments in the context of how modern
architecture has been depicted reveals the effect that the collusion of architect, photographer
and publisher has had. As well as resulting in often insipid conventions that unduly flatter some
buildings and over-emphasize certain aspects of their design, the tyranny of the photographic
image can do a great disservice to alternative design and critical approaches. Clearly, buildings
that have been less effectively photographed have less chance of becoming validated as
part of architectural discourse: those whose qualities do not photograph well are not going
 IntrOductiOn 9

to communicate through the media. Adolf Loos wrote, in an early acknowledgement of the
dilemma: ‘It is my greatest pride that the interiors which I have created are totally ineffective
in photographs. I have to forgo the honour of being published in the various architectural
magazines’.23 Similarly the impact on discourse and the subsequent influence of alternative
strands of Modernism, such as the organic tradition of architects including Hugo Häring and
Hans Scharoun, was diminished by their failure to communicate effectively via photography
(see Chapter 3 by Peter Blundell Jones).
Already in the 1950s and 60s a number of architects, feeling that conventional architectural
photography misrepresented their work, insisted on alternative forms of representation.
Architects concerned with the occupation and social use of buildings, such as Aldo van Eyck and
Herman Hertzberger, insist on their work being shown occupied and in everyday use,24 whilst
designers for whom phenomenological experience is fundamental, such as Peter Zumthor,
often employ photography that instead of suggesting a categorical view in optimal conditions
seeks to represent the effects of materials and changing light conditions and seasons through
a more diffused approach. Zumthor illustrates his own phenomenological writings only with
small detail photographs,25 requiring the reader to do the work of imagining the whole for
themselves, or to visit it in person.
There have periodically been attempts by mainstream architectural journals to employ a
more critical photography, for example in Britain the Architectural Review’s ‘Manplan’ series from
1969–1970 that used photo journalism to represent the often devastating effects of Modernist
planning on the communities that it was built to house. Andrew Mead’s commissioning of art
photographers to illustrate specially themed editions of the Architects’ Journal in the 1990s (see
Chapter 6 by Robin Wilson) and the same magazine’s brief and unsuccessful experiment in 2005
with alternative forms of photography and graphic design that emphasized the inhabitation
and materiality of buildings and everyday, informal encounters with them, attuned to the
interests of a contemporary generation of British architects such as Caruso St John, Sergison
Bates and Tony Fretton, 26 provide rare examples of specifically critical practices.
Such innovations have, however, often been opposed by the professional architectural
readership of journals. In terms of current practice there have been few attempts to interrogate
the state of affairs whereby the photographer aims to depict architecture in the most positive
and uncritical interpretation, as if the principles of this Modernist practice have prevailed
where the Modernist architectural programme has not. Nor, outside of the work of a few
architects aware of how photography brings its own agenda to architectural discourse, can the
same reciprocity between photography and design as was evident in the pioneering days of
Modernism be so readily detected today.
The attraction of conventional architectural photography that flatters its subject matter
for architects wanting their own work to be made to appear as good as possible, and editors
wanting seductive imagery to sell magazines, is self-explanatory, but the resistance amongst
architects as consumers of the architectural press to more critical practices suggests a deeper
lying unease within the profession regarding its relationship to the production of images. There
is, perhaps, a resistance to the grounding myths of the scope and potential of architectural
design being undermined through critical approaches; or to having to acknowledge that
much of the activity of the architect is devoted to the production of images rather than
the creation of ‘pure’ built form alone, and that architects are more dependent upon the
photographer for their renown than they might care to admit.27 One result is that whereas in
the context of art photography the identity and intentions of the photographer are presented
10 Camera COnstructs

as being essential to understanding the work, in architectural publishing they are as far as
possible rendered invisible, in order to preserve the illusion that the image is an unmediated
and true record of the building. The extent of the photographer’s input is presented as being
limited to their skill in merely communicating the essence of the building and the architect’s
intentions. In a wider context critical art practices have addressed these issues, but these have
failed to significantly impact upon the hermetic world in which discourse on new architecture
is conducted between those professionally involved (see Chapter 6).
While the practice of architecture has changed much since the formative years of
Modernism, perhaps the practice of architectural photography has changed far less. The role of
the photograph in architectural discourse has, despite massive changes both in the technologies
of photography and the role and interpretation of architecture, remained constant in its
effectiveness, and the very best architectural photographers continue to produce inspiring and
insightful work. The goal of positive publicity for the architect is not the only possible aim of the
photographer: it may be that photographic practices bring with them a concrete representation
of architectural aims and programmes, transcending issues of specific sites and programmes.
Among recent practitioners the contemporary (and commissioned) work of Hélène Binet, for
example, can be seen as developing a reading of certain architects’ intentions, using a rigorous
process of selection and composition, even if this reading is not in itself critical.28 In particular
photo studies published in monographs on individual architects or buildings can afford the
opportunity for the photographer to engage in detail with the intentions and decisions of the
architect, as well as frequently allowing him or her to explore qualities of occupation, wear
and decay when representing older buildings that are denied in the journalistic coverage of
contemporary architecture.

Artistic and transformative practices

Beyond the exigencies of architectural journalism and professional architectural discourse, a

far wider ranging photographic enquiry into architectural themes takes place, and the subject
of architecture and its representation through photography has taken on a broad cultural
relevance. When considering this range of work it is necessary to distinguish architectural
photography, primarily commissioned by architects, from other artistic and documentary
photographic practices that take architecture and urban form as their subject matter. What
marks this distinction is not necessarily the techniques employed – many art photographers
use the same large format cameras and formal strategies as architectural photographers –
but primarily the artistic or critical intent that the photograph evidences as a result of the
photographer approaching architecture from a different perspective and pursuing different
goals.
In art practices, what is included or excluded from the photograph, how it is constructed
(or potentially staged), how much detail is revealed and where the focus lies all allow the
photographer to give specific and varied readings of architecture and urban form. The context
in which the work is encountered and the way in which it is presented also affect how it is
interpreted – it may even be that the same photograph can be considered as belonging to
a different kind of practice according to how it is viewed. Of course many photographers
straddle such distinctions, and will produce work both commissioned by architects and
originating either from a personal creative enquiry or commissioned by other sources; and
 IntrOductiOn 11

as we have seen, not all architects uniformly prefer their work to be flattered and presented
according to standardized conventions of architectural photography. Many critical art practices
can be seen as being contiguous with strands of architectural photography, and the most
compelling studies of buildings tend to exist on the boundaries of such practices. Exquisite
studies of architecture are produced by artists such as Candida Höfer or Richard Pare, who use
the techniques of architectural photography to study historic or ruined buildings as well, on
occasion, as contemporary architecture, such as Höfer’s documentation of David Chipperfield’s
recently completed Neues Museum in Berlin.29
Historically, two distinct approaches to photographing architectural subjects can be
identified. The early photography of architecture, whose practitioners were often regarded as
technicians rather than artists, was founded on an implicit trust in the medium’s documentary
veracity, and adhered to strict representational conventions intended to maintain its supposed
neutrality and objectivity: the influential French Commission des monuments historiques, for
example, began the process of documenting France’s historical treasures with a strict set of
rules for how its cathedrals and chateaux would be recorded.30 Later photographers exploited
the photographic medium’s indexical and categorizing attributes to highlight commonalities
and variations in architectural forms, thus building archives of comparable images to map
out an often highly personal vision of architecture. In the USA almost half of Walker Evans’
celebrated book American Photographs31 pictured architectural subjects: his social intention
transformed the documentation of mundane vernacular buildings into a form of critical
reflection and commentary on American values. Following on from this are the topographical
studies of industrial structures by the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, and
the deadpan documentation of American cities made by Louis Baltz and Ed Ruscha; the latter
renouncing all pretence to be a traditional artist but aligning photography with conceptual art
practices by mechanizing the process of taking the pictures for his famous systematic studies
of Los Angeles, or even commissioning them from other photographers (see Steven Jacobs’
discussion in Chapter 14). The inspiration of the Bechers and their teaching in Dusseldorf has
established a tradition that has developed into a substantial body of work moving in divergent
directions, including Thomas Struth’s detailed urban and architectural imagery and Andreas
Gursky’s sublime panoramic urban scenes and expansive depictions of the non-places of post-
industrial work and consumption; though the habitually bleak and deadpan urban views of
many of their followers, though prominent in many contemporary art contexts, risk becoming
clichéd. The extreme time-based work of Michael Wesely (discussed in Chapter 17 by William
Firebrace) is one of a number of positions taken by artist-photographers that transcend such
formal agendas.
An almost diametrically opposite approach, at least in principle, originates with the language
of early art photography, which was very much indebted to the conventions of painting, as can be
seen in the staged allegories of Henry Peach Robinson,32 for example. Developing other specific
properties of photography, above all its ability to register the effects of light, an impressionistic,
romantic tradition evolved that is fascinated by atmosphere over detail, and reached maturity with
the self-consciously ‘artistic’ fin de siècle Pictorialist school of Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz and
Frederick Evans. It was against the rules set out for the ‘proper’ documentation of architecture and
monuments that many of the Pictorialists rebelled. The English photographer Evans thus chose to
evoke rather than record the cathedrals of northern France in soft and atmospheric focus. As he
wrote, he wanted to ‘suggest the space, the vastness, the grandeur’ of these great monuments.33
In the United States, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler moved towards a harder line in work which
12 Camera COnstructs

developed elements of the abstract. Also pursuing interpretative and personal photographic
explorations of architectural subject matter, though drawn more to the idiosyncrasies and
frequently uncanny condition of the modern city, were photographers such as Charles Marville
or Eugène Atget, or the surrealist Brassaï. Whilst the more romantic strands of impressionistic and
Pictorialist photography have become conventionalized, photography’s potential to capture or
evoke the atmosphere of specific places and moments, and to act as a vehicle for a subjective
response to them, continues to inform the responses to architectural subjects of a wide range
of contemporary artists, including for example Rut Blees Luxemburg and Marc Atkins (Timothy
Wray’s analysis in Chapter 7 elaborates on this discussion).
The history of the great artist-photographers of the early twentieth century onwards is
marked by the belief that photography (together with film) was to become the paradigmatic
artistic medium of the modern world. Since the 1960s and 70s, art has increasingly engaged
with photography and many of the most significant artists of recent decades have made
photography their primary medium. It could be said that the earlier dialectic between
photography as a faithful record and as a medium of expression have been replaced by a more
universal sense that the accessibility, immediacy and flexibility of the practice of photography
makes it the paradigmatic means for a great variety of work that does not rely on externally
derived pre-existing artistic or cultural categorizations. Thus an artist such as Heidi Specker,
whose work at first glance might appear to constitute a documentary survey of architectural
forms, uses the medium to quietly explore her personal and emotional responses to buildings
that hold a specific resonance for her (see Chapter 7).
Whereas commercial architectural photography necessarily takes buildings as a largely
autonomous primary source and operates within a defined discourse, in other forms of practice
architecture is seen in relation to wider physical, cultural, social, conceptual or personal
contexts. Art practices also take far more wide-ranging architectural forms as their subjects,
including seemingly undesigned or improvised spaces and structures; the architecture of
urban, commercial and industrial infrastructure; the superimpositions of the modern city; and
historic, neglected or ruined buildings.
The fabric and spaces of the modern city have inspired an astonishingly diverse range
of photographic responses. The non-places, to use Marc Augé’s term,34 that modernity creates
between the works of architecture celebrated in architectural photography, but which
Modernists often prefer not to engage with, have exerted a particular fascination for many
photographers. This gaze can be deeply disillusioning, but can also find great beauty in the
everyday. If sometimes showing things about architecture and cities that do not always make
comfortable viewing for architects or planners – the limits of what design can achieve in the
face of economic, social and political forces; the degradation of nature and social divisions that
much building activity causes; how transient, unexceptional or irrelevant design gestures can
quickly come to seem – contemporary photography can also find an astonishing beauty or
profundity in modern spaces, forms and landscapes: a beauty that the self-imposed limitations
of how architecture is represented in its own discourses and professional publications often
excludes. In such artistic enquiries, approaches to photographing architecture and the urban
environment, and to a lesser extent landscapes, are often consistent, with little distinction being
made between representations of individual buildings and the contexts in which they exist.
Art practices thus suggest a way of developing a richer and more holistic understanding of
architectural objects and processes, and underscore the evident limitations of an architectural
photography very much focusing on the building as the perfected object.
 IntrOductiOn 13

Furthermore, the conventions by which the presence of the photographer in the taking
of the architectural photograph is, as far as possible, denied, limit the possibilities not only
for a critical reflection on its means of production, but also for a creative engagement with
the question of the viewing subject’s placement in relation to the subject photographed in
perceptual, emotional or psychological terms. Art photography, by contrast, opens up space for
reflection on the personal and cultural implications of the act of photographing, and enquiry
into the placing of the viewer in relation to the architectural object.
Looking further afield, documentary and reportage practices, including street photography,
despite generally not taking buildings as their primary subject matter, can nonetheless also
tell us a great deal about architecture and the city, either by setting them in various social,
historical and narrative contexts, by examining everyday encounters with them, or by exploring
their wider cultural role. The contemporary systematic photographic recording of the streets
of an increasing number of (primarily Western) cities by Google for their online Street View
navigation service offers an extreme case of a fully automated photographic documentation
that does not offer any potential for individual creative interpretations by the photographer,
and yet it is not neutrally objective, and can be seen to be informed by preconceived hierarchies
as to how and what visual information should be documented (see Chapter 10 by Ben Campkin
and Rebecca Ross). Such new online forms of photographic documentation are likely to have a
profound impact on how architecture and cities are conceived of and shaped, albeit one that as
yet remains largely unknown.
Many such practices have in common a questioning of the cultural and social place of
architecture, and the role it plays as a signifier. ‘To photograph is to confer importance’, as Susan
Sontag has written.35 Culture legitimates particular forms of society, and photography’s role
may often be to subvert established narratives and of ways of seeing. As Sontag observes, ‘in
teaching us a new visual code, photographs enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and
what we have the right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of
seeing.’36 Architecture provides a wealth of cultural codes for such photographic appropriations
in its form, intentionality and social function. The work of a number of contemporary
photographic artists even forms a direct critique of the practice and conventions of architectural
photography: as is evident for example in Thomas Ruff revisiting and reworking imagery of
Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, or Oliver Boberg building precise scale models of architecture
and photographing these. Olivio Barbieri employs almost a direct inverse of this technique in
photographing landmark buildings using tilt-shift techniques such that they appear to be toy
model versions of themselves (as Mark Morris discusses in Chapter 12). Artists such as Dionisio
Gonzalez or Beate Guetschow carefully digitally stitch together fragments of photographs to
create collage architectures, also playing with the codes of architectural photography and our
expectations of the medium to make us look with fresh eyes at built structures and the utopian
impulses that they often embody, suggesting perhaps that the mundane and everyday can
become, in the eyes of the beholder, extraordinary.
One of the fundamental drivers of the pioneering New Photography of the 1920s and 30s
was the belief that the camera had a transformative potential to create a new architecture. As we
have seen, to a considerable extent photography has already discreetly achieved this ambition
through the influence that it has exerted on architectural historiography, discourse, education
and design practices. Many architects’ practices, however, push the medium further in a
propositional direction. The hybrid form of the photomontage can be seen to be instrumental
in Mies van der Rohe’s conception of space, with its effects mirrored in the buildings that
14 Camera COnstructs

resulted and in their photographic representation; whilst Eileen Gray provides an example of
an architect who found the camera to be an ideal tool not only for documenting her work,
but for distilling its essence and mapping out her personal architectural programme (see
Chapter 19 by Rosamund Diamond). We might also speak of an ‘architectural photography’
that does not necessarily take buildings as its subject matter, but is architectural in its concern
with light, form, materials and spatial relationships – either in an abstract sense as with
Moholy-Nagy’s photograms, or in work that takes man-made or natural structures and renders
them architectural through the way in which the image is constructed (see Timothy Wray’s
discussion of the work of Josef Koudelka in Chapter 16). Moholy-Nagy in particular explored
radical possibilities for a new architecture of light and form (interpreted by Ivana Wingham in
Chapter 18).
Many contemporary architects too, in the footsteps of Le Corbusier, Moholy-Nagy and the
Bauhaus, have explored alternative photographic practices, not only to represent built works,
but to formulate critical positions, capture ideas, and as a protagonist in the formation and
development of design proposals. In setting out their early agendas Robert Venturi37 and Rem
Koolhaas, for example, embraced the published page as a site for their activities every bit as
valid as the building site. Koolhaas further makes the photography of his buildings in S M L XL38
subvert the genre: OMA’s Villa d’Ava is photographed inhabited – by a giraffe! – while the interior
of the Kunsthal in Rotterdam is photographed overlaid with the narrative of a conversation of
a rather fractious couple passing through the building, and not in any recognizable way taking
account of the architecture that is pictured. Forms of collage or photomontage, such as those
employed by Mies van der Rohe, Alison and Peter Smithson or in contemporary practice by the
office of Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue, can also be seen both to reflect an aesthetic
sensibility aligned with their design intentions, and to inform their conceptualization of the site,
the building process and the future form of projects in development.
Stereoscopic photography (whose history is discussed by Richard Difford in Chapter 21)
has a particular fascination in this context, its three-dimensional representations seeming
to bridge the gap between the flat surface of the photograph and the spatial experience of
architecture, and, arguably, opening up a new way of understanding space. Amongst the most
radical engagements with both two-dimensional and stereoscopic photography in the design
process are those of Penelope Haralambidou and Nat Chard (who discuss their own work in the
final two chapters of the book): Haralambidou taking as the inspiration for a series of mixed-
media works Duchamp’s explorations into stereography; and Chard drawing on practices such
as spirit and scientific photography and the construction of natural history dioramas, which
go beyond simple documentation of a subject, in his construction of a series of ‘drawing
instruments’ built around cameras, that seek to spatialize architectural representations and
make them contingent.

Interrogating the photographic medium

Informing many of these various photographic practices, and forming the basis for different
critical approaches to writing about photography, are a range of often contested theoretical and
epistemological descriptions of the nature of the medium itself, its cultural and social function,
and accordingly the identity and role of the photographer. Throughout its history competing
claims have been made for photography as a means of artistic expression, or as a technical and
 IntrOductiOn 15

documentary tool, a split that mirrors the opposing romantic and indexical practices discussed
above. When presented in a fine art context photographs are often discussed using the same
language and terms of reference used to describe traditional representational forms such as
painting or drawing, and the content of the image is ascribed solely to the creative intentions
of the photographer; a position considerably aided by the implications of conceptual art, which
identifies the artist as primarily an originator of ideas, not necessarily as a skilled craftsman –
indeed conceptual artists’ output itself is frequently constituted less as a traditional art object
than in its photographic documentation. The evident limitation of treating photography
as a traditional art form is that it fails to acknowledge the role of the photographed subject,
the technological nature of the camera or the mass-reproduciblity of photographic imagery
in determining how meaning is embedded in a photograph and in how it is interpreted.
Furthermore, although in the case for example of photograms or specialized cameras built
by artists, the manual techniques employed are decisive in shaping the resulting images, the
fundamental nature of the photographic medium – the momentary effects of light captured
permanently on a receptive surface – remains essentially unchanged since the day of its
invention, and an insistence on the primary significance of the individual technique of the
photographer arguably misconstrues the technical operation of the medium. Indeed certain
nineteenth-century photographs, for example, can appear to us as strikingly contemporary or
prescient of later developments – perhaps the choice of subject and the way photographs are
presented and disseminated, as well as the way in which we look at them, changes more than
the way in which they are taken.
An alternative position that gained increasing currency in the 1970s and 80s drew on work
in cultural criticism, social history and semiotics and the writings of Walter Benjamin, Roland
Barthes and Michel Foucault in particular to condemn photography being treated as an art for
the resulting way in which the subject is aestheticized and subsumed.39 The medium ought,
went the argument, instead to be considered in social, cultural and political terms. Victor Burgin
thus argues that photographs do not have intrinsic meanings instilled in them by the artist, as is
customarily held to be the case in a fine art context. The skill of the photographer cannot create
such meanings, instead they are dependent on the subject, and on the preconceptions of the
viewer and the circumstances of where and how they are seen. When ‘reading’ a photograph
we must thus be concerned with the sociological and political implications of the subject,
and wary of how the context and way in which the image is presented manipulates what it
communicates.40 In his 1934 essay ‘The Author as Producer’ Walter Benjamin thus insisted that
photography must have a ‘political tendency’.41 In this the caption attached to the photograph
is critical: Benjamin’s rhetorical question: ‘Will not the caption become the most important part
of the photograph?’42 makes clear the fundamental nature of the operation of the verbal over
the visual image.
In this context the compelling aesthetic of much photography can be troubling. In his Short
History of Photography, Benjamin, whose writing did so much to establish an understanding of
the processes of Modernist culture, articulated the experience many may have had in witnessing
photography’s aestheticizing tendency: ‘The camera is now incapable of photographing
a tenement or rubbish heap without transfiguring it, not to mention a river dam or electric
cable factory: in front of these photography can only say “how beautiful”.’43 Susan Sontag’s
interpretation of the idea of beauty in this context invokes a fundamental questioning of the
photographic process: ‘So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world, that
photographs, rather than the world have become the standard of the beautiful.’44 Reading the
16 Camera COnstructs

architectural photography of Modernism in the light of these remarks, Sontag’s perception can
be seen as particularly acute: the idea of modern architecture has so often been communicated
through photography that an ideal, utopian in spirit but unachievable in material form, has
often appeared to be the goal. Photography has furnished idealized images of architecture that
buildings in a less-than-ideal world have failed to match.
The self-consciously sober renunciation of photography as a medium for self-expression
that distinguishes the work of the Becher school and its descendants can be seen to be born
from an awareness of these issues, though ironically this has done nothing to prevent their
work being presented as a fine art practice in a gallery context. However, just as contemporary
photographic practices can be seen to be moving on from this rather limiting outlook, so too
does much recent critical writing seek to escape such polemical absolutes. A dogmatic insistence
that writing on photography ought above all to highlight how it constructs meanings fails to
do justice either to the diversity and richness of photographic practices, or acknowledge more
nuanced readings of the medium’s specific qualities and history.45 The work of writers such as
Benjamin, Burgin, Barthes and Sontag remains central to much critical writing on photography,
but perhaps as a result of their warnings, or of the almost universal awareness of how easily
photographs in the digital age can be manipulated, the constructed nature of photographic
imagery and the determining role of the contexts in which it is encountered, and the resulting
difficulty of ascribing meaning or ‘truth’ to it, are accepted without their being seen to prevent
or necessarily dominate further theoretical speculation. Instead, in an architectural context a
range of diverse historical and theoretical enquiries – exemplified by the essays collected in
this volume – are being conducted into the ways in which photography institutes and mediates
a range of aesthetic, personal, social, political, ethical and spatial relationships between the
subject photographed, the photographer and the viewing subject; and the interdependence
of built and imagined architectures and their representations – that is to say, into the ways in
which the camera constructs its own architectures.
One role ascribed to the medium which generates a rich vein of critical work is as an
aid to seeing, either marking and signifying the human gaze, or as a distinctive mechanical /
digital gaze that supplants the human eye and imposes its own parameters, limitations and
codes, which subsequently tend to become invisible and taken as natural in how we think
about architecture. Just as a number of contemporary artists use the photographic medium
to conduct an enquiry into how we look at the world, so the implications of this act of looking
and the relationships that it establishes form the basis for much critical and speculative writing.
Philosophical and psychoanalytic readings, often borrowing ideas from linguistic structuralism
and suggesting that subjectivity must be understood in terms of the way the individual is
physically and culturally located, are used to question how photography locates and defines
the viewing subject in relation to architecture and the city.
Vision is often associated with power, and the photographic gaze is seen in readings
informed by writers such as Lacan and Foucault to have a political and ethical dimension, at both
individual and societal levels – ‘placing’ individuals and groups visually, socially and spatially.
The mechanical photographic gaze imposes its own hierarchies, and can be seen to collude
with wider social and political forces, demanding a continued sociopolitical reading of the act
of photographing and of the dissemination and consumption of photographs (in Chapter 8
Edward Whittaker for example suggests that a sociopolitical position can be read from three
different photographers representations of urban sites). The photographic medium can also be
regarded as a means of story-telling, both recounting found narratives and generating its own.