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 Talbots 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.

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 photographs apparent truthfulness was compelling but ambiguous in its effects. One starting point for this books 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. Architectures use of photography is one of its most fundamental practices, and yet whereas art criticism has intensively studied and challenged the mediums 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.

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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 cameras 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, Vilm 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.

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 Westons 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

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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 Tauts 1929 Die neue Baukunst in Europa und Amerika,10 Gustav Platzs 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, Lszl 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

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 Corbusiers 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 Modernisms construction of a new society, was represented for example in Erich Mendelsohns 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 Gropiuss Dessau Bauhaus, itself the subject of many photographic studies by the Bauhauss 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

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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 photographers 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 Holdens 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 wideangle three-quarter views to emphasize a buildings 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).

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 lenss 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, Pictons 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

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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 Hring 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 Reviews Manplan series from 19691970 that used photo journalism to represent the often devastating effects of Modernist planning on the communities that it was built to house. Andrew Meads 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 magazines 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

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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 photographers input is presented as being limited to their skill in merely communicating the essence of the building and the architects 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 Hlne 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

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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 Hfer 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 Hfers documentation of David Chipperfields 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 mediums 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 Frances historical treasures with a strict set of rules for how its cathedrals and chateaux would be recorded.30 Later photographers exploited the photographic mediums 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 Struths detailed urban and architectural imagery and Andreas Gurskys sublime panoramic urban scenes and expansive depictions of the non-places of postindustrial 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 clichd. 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 sicle 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

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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 Eugne Atget, or the surrealist Brassa. Whilst the more romantic strands of impressionistic and Pictorialist photography have become conventionalized, photographys 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 Wrays 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 Augs 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.

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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 subjects 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 photographys 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 Rohes 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 Rohes conception of space, with its effects mirrored in the buildings that

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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-Nagys 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 Wrays 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: OMAs Villa dAva 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 mixedmedia works Duchamps 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

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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: Benjamins 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 photographys 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 Sontags interpretation of the idea of beauty in this context invokes a fundamental questioning of the photographic process: So successful has been the cameras role in beautifying the world, that photographs, rather than the world have become the standard of the beautiful.44 Reading the

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architectural photography of Modernism in the light of these remarks, Sontags 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 mediums 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.

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Photographs taken, or presented, as a collection or in series in particular can have a narrative quality (Mary Woods in Chapter 13 examines the way in which Walker Evans built a compelling visual critique of pre-revolutionary Havana through his photo-essay accompanying Carleton Bealss polemic The Crime of Cuba). Even the apparently neutral work of photographers such as the Bechers arises and is reproduced in specific historic and cultural contexts, with its making influenced by the personal positions of the photographers, and its interpretation determined by those of its viewers (see Chapter 15 by Ian Wiblin). The material presence of the photograph, and the sense that it not only represents the world but is a fragmentary repository of it and an object in its own right, inspire creative theoretical engagements with the mediums relationship to specific places and moments or durations in time, and its potential to affect personal and emotional responses. Psychoanalytically informed readings in particular thus explore photographys emotional resonance and phenomenological qualities (see Chapter 7 by Timothy Wray). Photographys relationship to temporality is more complex than the clichs of the frozen moment in time, or the seemingly timeless presentation of new architecture in conventional architectural photography, would suggest: the long exposures of Michael Wesely for example represent a fundamentally different time-space relationship (see Chapter 17 by William Firebrace). Lszl Moholy-Nagys photograms likewise prompt speculation on the temporality and spatiality of the medium (discussed by Ivana Wingham in Chapter 18). Through its interpretative and transformative potential and the web of visual and spatial relationships between representations and gazes that it institutes, photography (or our interactions with and responses to it) can even be conceived to institute an architectonic structure of its own one that colours and can even supersede unmediated physical encounters with architecture. Perhaps the most influential figure to investigate such a propositional potential in photography was Moholy-Nagy, who saw his photograms as producing a new kind of space; whilst the contemporary work of Penelope Haralambidou and Nat Chard builds on practical and artistic experimentation, primarily with stereoscopic photography, to interrogate the nature of the spatial and optical relationships between the camera, the images it produces, what these images represent and those who view them (see Chapters 22 and 23). Ultimately this work seeks to occupy and creatively exploit the spaces that the interaction of such photographic constructs with other forms of architectural production create.

CAMERA COnStRUctS: Introducing the chapters The broad range of academic research into the photography of architecture is reflected in the following chapters. The book is divided into four sections arranged around the types of practices that the individual chapters discuss. The organization of the sections aims to encourage an awareness of common ground and possible synergies between these case studies, though they are not hermetic in terms of the ideas that inform and arise from these practices, or in the position vis--vis the nature of the medium that the author adopts. Section I, Modernism and the Published Photograph, focuses on the fundamental role played by photography published in books and journals in the formation of Modernist practices of architectural design exploring the creative synergy between the two, the way in which the printed page became a contested site for architects to set out and defend their visions, as well as the limitations of conventional representations of architecture and the way in which they can curtail alternative readings and suppress rival design approaches.

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Section II, Architecture and the City Re-imagined, sets out a number of interpretative structures that interrogate photography in terms of particular philosophical, political and social constructs, with a profound impact on how buildings and cities are imagined; and explores how various photographic practices including aerial photography, photographic surveys, online navigational tools and photography of architectural models effect a re-imagining of architecture and urban form. Section III, Interpretative Constructs, examines the work of a number of individual artist photographers who demonstrate very differing approaches to architectural subject matter, beyond the conventions of mainstream architectural photography. In each of their bodies of work photography becomes the agent of a radical interpretative model. Their fundamentally different aesthetic, social, personal, conceptual and historical interpretations not only demonstrate how different responses to architecture can be, but also suggest possiblities for a much expanded definition of how architecture is represented. Section IV, Photography in Design Practices, studies a range of interdisciplinary and collaborative practices that actively engage the camera in design strategies, based on the belief that photography, in particular using techniques such as montage and stereography that break free from the naturalizing effect of the image, as the seminal modern medium has the potential to go beyond documenting and defining readings of built works, to radically engage with design processes.

notes
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Appearing as a series from 1844 to 1846, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844 to 1846) can claim to be the first book of photographs to be published. Robin Evans, Translations of Drawing to Building in Translations of Drawing to Building and other essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), pp15293. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, English edition (London: Harper Collins, 1984), p5. Vilm Flusser (English edition editor Derek Bennett), Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Gttingen, Germany: European Photography Andreas Muller-Pohle, 1984), p7. Ibid., p18. Neue Sachlichkeit, generally translated in English as the new objectivity describes the widespread cultural realist movement in Germany in the 1920s. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p18. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, op. cit., p14.

10 Bruno Taut, Die neue Baukunst in Europa und Amerika (Stuttgart: Hoffmann, 1929). 11 Gustav Adolf Platz, Die Baukunst der Neuesten Zeit (Berlin: Propylen, 1927). 12 See Andrew Higgott, Mediating Modernism (London: Routledge, 2007), pp4255 for a discussion of this example. 13 Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, English edition (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), p28.

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14 Robert Elwall, Building with Light (London: Merrell, 2004), p127. 15 Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika. Bilderbuch eines Architekten (Berlin: Mosse, 1926). 16 Students at the Bauhaus often used their own building as the subject of photographic experiment: see Bauhausfotographie (London: Goethe Institute, 1990). 17 Le Corbusiers pre-Purist Villa Schwob did, however, have to be transformed by visual editing in order to conform to the later orthodoxy of Modernist representation. Beatriz Colomina has illustrated how its picturesque and site-specific features were erased from photographic reproduction, and any view of its steeply-sloping site eliminated. See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, op. cit. pp10711. 18 Architects Journal, 25 July 1979, pp17590. 19 J.M. Richards, Memoirs of an Unjust Fella (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980), p137. 20 M. Dell and H. Wainwright became the official photographers of the Architectural Review in 1930, and made a significant contribution to the documentation of contemporary architectural work. 21 Janet Abrams, Available for Viewing, in M. Caiger Smith (ed.), Site Work (London: Photographers Gallery, 1990), pp77. 22 Ibid. 23 Adolf Loos quoted by Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, op. cit. p42, citing London Arts Council, Adolf Loos (1984), p106. 24 Violette Cornelius provided striking images of Van Eycks work inhabited: see also discussion in Robert Elwall, Building with Light, op. cit. p163. 25 See for example Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture (Baden: Lars Muller, 1998). 26 See Timothy Wray, AJ own-goal? (translation), Il Giornale dellarchitettura, January 2006. 27 An argument informed by Jonathan Hills application of Roland Barthes text The Death of the Author to architectural practices see for example: Jonathan Hill, Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users (London: Routledge, 2003). 28 Binet has published commissioned work for a number of leading avant garde architects including Zaha Hadid, Danial Libeskind and Peter Zumthor since the late 1980s. See her book: Helene Binet, Composing with Architecture (London: Phaidon, 2011). 29 Candida Hfer, Neues Museum Berlin (Kln: Walther Konig, 2010). 30 On this documentary work in France see Photographier larchitecture 18511920 (Paris: Reunion des musees nationaux, 1994). 31 Walker Evans, American Photographs (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938). 32 Henry Peach Robinson is discussed in Ian Jeffrey, Photography: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981). 33 Quoted in Ian Jeffrey, Photography: A Concise History, Ibid. p102. 34 Marc Aug, Non-Places (London: Verso, 1995). 35 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1978), p28. 36 Ibid. p3. 37 The photographic image is central to the development of an architectural programme in Robert Venturis Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966). 38 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S M L XL (New York: Monacelli, 1995).

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39 See: Introduction to Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008). 40 See: Victor Burgin (ed), Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982). 41 Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, in Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982), p16. 42 Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography, in One Way Street and other Writings (London: Verso, 1992), p256. 43 Walter Benjamin quoted in Sontag, op. cit., p107. 44 Sontag, op. cit. p85. 45 A position whose implications are mapped out in the various chapters in Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008).