Visual Resources

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ISSN: 0197-3762 (Print) 1477-2809 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvir20

Intersection of Photography and

ArchitectureIntroduction

Maria Antonella Pelizzari & Paolo Scrivano

To cite this article: Maria Antonella Pelizzari & Paolo Scrivano (2011) Intersection of
Photography and ArchitectureIntroduction, Visual Resources, 27:2, 107-112, DOI:
10.1080/01973762.2011.568142

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Published online: 23 May 2011.

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Intersection of Photography and
ArchitectureIntroduction

Maria Antonella Pelizzari and Paolo Scrivano

This special issue of Visual Resources presents a discussion on the intersection between
Visual
10.1080/01973762.2011.568142
GVIR_A_568142.sgm
0197-3762
Taylor
2011
20Article
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scrivano@bu.edu
PaoloScrivano
00000June
Resources
andFrancis
& (print)/1477-2809(online)
Francis
2011

architecture and photography, two closely interconnected disciplines whose interplay has
evolved significantly over time. Since the invention of photography during the nineteenth
century, the control over the visual representation of the built world has been contested
between the architect and the photographer. The resulting relationship has moved from an
initial reliance on photography in documenting buildings (and thus from its subordinate role
to architecture) to a contemporary association in which architects depend on photographic
images to convey a message or to legitimize their work. The essays included in this special issue
offer a spectrum of different cases and modalities of interaction that cast light on a dynamic
and often conflicted connection, proposing a reflection on the complexity and intricacy of the
transcription of buildings onto photographic surfaces. Neither an indexical recording of the
building nor an equivalent of architectural drawings, photographic representations of artifacts
and built spaces reflect varying ideologies and politics, as well as evolving cultural and
professional agendas.
Keywords: Architecture; Photography; Professions; Mass Reproduction; Mass Circulation;
Visual Culture; Ideology; Interdisciplinary

Photography of architecture is about a complex transcription of a three-dimensional

world onto a small flat surface. It is also the testimony of the interaction between two
closely related and yet somewhat conflicting disciplines, whose interplay has grown
entangled in recent times: while architects and historians continue to deploy photo-
graphs as indexical records of artifacts, buildings and sites are growingly identified
with their photographic image as a consequence of the emphasis placed today on
architecture as a form of mass communication.
The history of the partnership of architecture and photography is captivating for
its numerous facets and nuances: it interrogates photography as an automatic drawing
or a direct imprint of the constructed world, but it also accentuates the rhetoric and
ideology of the photograph as an image crafted toward a particular communicative
goal. From the start, when the invention of photography was publicly announced in
1839, a long series of enthusiastic observations by historians and photographers
reported on the experience of physically being there, while holding a small daguerre-
otype of a Venetian palace or counting the detailed panes of glass of a window
imprinted on a paper negative of ones own home. These striking statements
articulated by John Ruskin (18191900), William Henry Fox Talbot (18001877), and

Visual Resources, Volume 27, Number 2, June 2011

ISSN 01973762 2011 Taylor & Francis
108 Pelizzari and Scrivano

numerous other travelers and historians of a time pastbecame layered with contem-
porary accounts that privileged the position of the architect as the main orchestrator
of a message.1
In his compelling study of Second Empire photographs by douard Baldus
(18131889), Barry Bergdoll notes that the photographer remained for the architect
a nameless presence and that the photograph, or dessin photographique as it was
often called, could be signed by the author of the building rather than by the author
of the representation.2 Furthermore, this seemingly transparent record responded
to a precise agenda. Balduss photographic style carved buildings from the urban
context with the specific intent of interpreting Baron Georges-Eugne Haussmanns
(18091891) politics of dgagement, where monuments appeared as new beacons
within open vistas. This attitude persisted for long, since early twentieth-century
architectural historiography built its narratives on the identification between objects
and their photographic representations.3
In fact, if nineteenth-century photography of architecture was characterized by an
invisible and yet ongoing history of image manipulation and physical retouching,
these considerations informed modernist practices even more radically. Beatriz Colo-
mina and Jean-Louis Cohen have profusely written on Le Corbusiers (18871965)
alterations of photographs in order to support his theories, and his profound
understanding of the printed media as a new context of production, existing in
parallel with the construction site, as exemplified by his early publications, in partic-
ular the journal LEsprit nouveau.4
Similar considerations about the symbolic use of photography apply to Ludwig
Mies van der Rohes (18861969) early photomontages, where the architect cut and
pasted photographic reproductions and drawings of a projected glass skyscraper
(19211922) and of the Adam Department Store (19281929) into the existing urban
texture of Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, in order to build realisticand yet unrealized
graphic projects. These alterations vary from perfect camouflages to Miess visible
manual alterations, where the architects workor signatureprevails over the
mimetic qualities of the photograph. This symbiotic history of modern photography
and architecture moves back and forth, from a critique of photography as a form of
disconnect from the real (in particular, with Adolf Loos [18701933]) to its embrace
as mechanical and industrial reproduction (with Walter Gropius [18831969] cham-
pioning Bauhaus photography), to the challenge of translating the asymmetrical plans
of Konstantin Melnikovs (18901974) Constructivist architecture (in particular, his
temporary pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of Decorative Arts of 1925)
into a well-organized photographic description.5 Throughout the history of modern-
ism, photography and architecture became intertwined in the publication and discus-
sion of new projects, but the collaboration of these two media raised questions about
representation and the actual experience of the building.
Such a contested authorship, deeply ingrained in nineteenth-century photo-
graphic commissions, has reached a complete turn with the postmodern debate,
informing contemporary practices and inducing architects to think increasingly
photographically. As Benjamin Buchloh has observed, advanced postmodern
architects direct their design towards a newly found ability of architectural masses,
 Intersection of Photography and Architecture 109

materials and spaces to yield to the laws of the photographic surface in an endless
process of transforming the tectonic and spatial into the spectacular.6 Similarly,
contemporary photographers perform architectural practices, as in the case of German
sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand (b. 1964) who transforms printed
photographs retrieved from media into models constructed-to-be-photographed.
It is evident from these brief notes and from the existing literaturemostly
elaborated by historians of architecture and contemporary art theoriststhat a debate
on the relation between architecture and photography can only be productive through
an interdisciplinary approach that takes into consideration the context of production
and media distribution of images entailing two distinctyet interconnectedauthor-
ships. From the point of view of the photo-historian, this particular approach brings a
new narrative to the canonical sequence of masterpieces of architectural photogra-
phyfrom Roger Fenton (18191869) or douard Baldus to Walker Evans (1903
1975) or Bernd Becher (19312007) and Hilla Becher (b. 1934)7and defies a simple
definition of the photograph as index or a direct imprint of the built world. As it
speaks of collective memory and interpretation, this visual translation hints to
photography as an imperfect and ubiquitous traceas a variable field of practices that
intersects with architecture, historiography, and politics. From the point of view of the
architectural historian, this critical encounter with photography provokes other
important questions about the democratic and/or authoritative presentation of a
building as public imagenot as a document but as a special kind of drawing that
needs to be codified.
The four essays included in this monographic issue of Visual Resources, which
originate from the session Photography and Architecture: Shaping a New Dialogue
held at the ninety-seventh Annual Conference of the College Art Association, Los
Angeles, 2009, address many of these issues. They offer a spectrum of different cases
and modalities of interaction that cast light on the dynamic and often contested
connection existing between architecture and photography.
The first article by Claude Baillargeon on the fundraising campaign for the
construction of the Sacr-Coeur in Paris describes the unbalanced relationship that,
towards the end of the nineteenth century, brought the two disciplines together.
Considered a pure witness of reality and deemed important only for its role to solicit
donations, photography in this example plays a subordinate role to architecture.
Contested questions of authorship remain in the background of the case studied by
Baillargeon. Not retaining control over the realized images, Maison Durandelle, the
photographic studio charged with the campaigns execution, played only a marginal
part in shaping the artifacts visual representation. As it is well known in our image-
saturated society, it would take time for the photographic medium to acquire a degree
of autonomy, but the first signs of change could be recognized by the time of the
completion of the basilica.
The second essay by Wei-Cheng Lin looks at the case of architect and historian
Liang Sicheng (19011972) and his use of photography in fieldwork studies on Chinas
traditional buildings. Liangs survey activity resonated the concerns about the status of
the countrys artistic patrimony in one of the most tormented periods of modern
Chinese history. In this peculiar context, Liang entered into competition with Japanese
110 Pelizzari and Scrivano

surveyors who had embarked on documenting campaigns that assisted Japans pan-
Asiatic project of political and cultural leadership. A highly contested vision of Chinese
historical architecture materialized through these endeavors: Liangs shots, often
animated by human presence, contrasted with the images of dilapidated buildings
produced by the Japanese photographers. The claimed objectivity of the photographic
medium, whose technical face was seen as an emblem of modernity in China in the
1930s and 1940s, conflicted with the evident partiality that characterized each sides
visual reading of the subject under scrutiny.
Juliana Maxims article further expands on the distinct and yet interrelated
characters of architecture and photography. Maxim discusses how in socialist
Romania the former became almost subordinated to the latter, contributing to a
depiction of architecture in primarily photographic terms. In the same way images
of orderly and precisely arranged events became visual markers of the socialist world,
serial and repetitive views of architectural details ended up dominating the imagery of
professional publications: photography, therefore, was used to reframe architecture in
socialist visual conventions. The Romanian case presented by Maxim is certainly
paradigmatic of the condition of architectural photography in postwar East Europe:
behind the Iron Curtain, architectures appreciation (and social value) developed in
close connection to its visual representation, while, at the same time, photographic
views of built spaces fulfilled the difficult mission of mediating between the public and
private spheres.8 Despite the obvious differences in chronological and geographical
settings, Lins and Maxims articles unravel along parallel lines as they both make
evident the possibilities expressed by photography of architecture in molding and
carrying powerful ideological messages.9
The issues final essay by Philip Ursprung describes the collaboration that devel-
oped during the late 1980s between architect Peter Zumthor (b. 1943) and photogra-
pher Hans Danuser (b. 1953). Influenced by his previous visual investigations into the
relation between naturality and artificiality, Danuser advanced a photographic
interpretation of Zumthors work based on a reading of architecture as intimately
connected to the environment. As Ursprung explains, Danuser had probably been
influenced by a number of photo-reportages carried out between the end of 1970s and
the early 1980s in which he had portrayed science laboratories and nuclear plants as
sites where the line dividing the natural from the human-made becomes blurred.
Likewise, in the shots realized by Danuser, Zumthors Sogn Benedetg Chapel dissolves
into the landscape of the Surselva district, in the Swiss Alps, with the photographic
image almost imposing its character over the architecture. Thanks to Ursprungs
analysis, one can see how deeply the relation between architecture and photography
has evolved since the times of the construction of the Sacr-Coeur: photography today
is able to claim not only its disciplinary autonomy but also its contribution to the
rising conversion of architecture into a media phenomenon.10
What unites these four articles is their investigation of the multiple forms through
which the interaction between architecture and photography developed from the
nineteenth century to the present. The issue is completed by the addition of Gio
Pontis Discorso sullarte fotografica (Discussion on the Art of Photography, 1932), an
article offered in English translation for the first time which allows the exploration of
 Intersection of Photography and Architecture 111

the intellectual engagement of an Italian modern architect in the understanding of

photography as an autonomous art form and original copy of the built environ-
ment. Finally, three commentaries dedicated to theme-related books in the reviews
section enhance the perspective of the discussion with additional case studies. The aim
of this special issue is in fact to raise new questions and test new interpretative theories
about a relationship that remains, still today, as much problematic as it is intriguing.

MARIA ANTONELLA PELIZZARI is associate professor in the Department of Art at Hunter

College, and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She earned her PhD in the
history of photography from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque and her MA in
art history from the Universit di Genova (Italy). She has been associate curator of photog-
raphy at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, where she organized
the exhibition and edited the book Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics
of Representation (2003), which was awarded the Historians of British Art book prize in 2004.
She is the author of Photography and Italy (2011), a historical study that represents the first
and only book on this subject in English, and is working on a new book on photomontage
in Italy in the 1930s. She has contributed essays to several books, among them, Real Venice
(2011); Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani 19782008 (2010); Picturing Place: Photography
and the Geographical Imagination (2002); America: The New World in 19th- Century Painting
(1999). Her essays have been published in History of Photography; Visual Resources; After-
image; Performing Arts Journal; Casabella; Fotologia; Photography and Culture; Perspective.
La revue de lINHA. Actualits de la recherche en histoire de lart ; and CV Magazine.
PAOLO SCRIVANO is assistant professor of modern architectural history in the Depart-
ment of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. He holds a PhD degree in
history of architecture from the Politecnico di Torino and has taught at the Politecnico di
Milano and at the University of Toronto; he has been scholar and fellow at various institu-
tions, including the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the Center for Advanced
Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and Boston Universitys Humani-
ties Foundation. He has organized symposia and exhibitions, edited books, and contrib-
uted essays and chapters to collective works. His publications and activities include the
volumes Tra Guerra e Pace. Societ, Cultura e Architettura nel Secondo Dopoguerra (1998),
Storia di unidea di architettura moderna. Henry-Russell Hitchcock e lInternational Style
(2001), and Olivetti Builds: Modern Architecture in Ivrea (2001); the exhibition Building the
Human City: Adriano Olivetti and Town-Planning (2002); and the organization of the
international conference The Americanization of Postwar Architecture (Toronto 2005).
His writings have been published in periodicals such as Architecture and Ideas, Contempo-
rary European History, Journal of Contemporary History, Planning Perspectives, Storia
Urbana, Urban History Review, Zodiac, and 20/21me sicles. His current work is dedicated
to the relation between Italian and American architectural cultures after 1945.

1 For a discussion on John Ruskins and Eugne Viollet-le-Ducs responses to

photography, see Christine Boyer, La Mission Hliographique: Architectural
Photography, Collective Memory and the Patrimony of France, 1851, in Picturing
Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, ed. Joan Schwarz and James
Ryan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 3240; on Talbots description of the Latticed
window at Lacock Abbey, see Geoffrey Batchen, A Philosophical Window, History
of Photography 26, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 10012.
112 Pelizzari and Scrivano

2 Barry Bergdoll, A Matter of Time: Architects and Photographers in Second Empire

France, in The Photographs of Edouard Baldus, ed. Malcolm Daniel (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 100.
3 See, for example, the multi-year research project by Giuseppe Varaldo, Giuseppe
Bellezza, and Laura Sasso, published under the title Architettura moderna: una
cronologia-repertorio di immagini, in twelve volumes between 1980 and 2001.
4 Beatriz Colomina, Introduction: On Architecture, Production and Reproduction,
in Beatriz Colomina, ed., Architectureproduction (New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1988), 1516; see also Jean-Louis Cohen, Introduction, in Le Corbusier,
Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 178.
5 Jean-Louis Cohen, The Misfortunes of the Image: Melnikov in Paris, 1925 (on
Architecture and Photography), in Colomina, Architectureproduction, 101121; see
also Claire Zimmermans comments on Adolf Loos in Photographic Modern Archi-
tecture: Inside the New Deep, Journal of Architecture 9 (Autumn 2004): 33154.
6 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, The Architectural Uncanny in the Photographs of Andrea
Robbins and Max Becher, in Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, ed. M. Catherine De
Zegher (Kortrijk: Kanaal Art Foundation, 1994), 17.
7 Consider a number of publications looking at architecture through the lenses of the
history of photography: Richard Pare, Photography and Architecture (Montreal and
New York: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Callaway Editions, 1982); Cervin
Robinson, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from
1839 to the Present (New York and Cambridge, MA: Architectural League of New
York and MIT Press, 1987); Robert Elwall, Building with Light: the International
History of Architectural Photography (London: Merrell, 2004).
8 On the mediation between public and private in the socialist world, see David
Crowley and Susan E. Reid, Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern
Bloc, in Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley
and Susan E. Reid (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 122; Katherine Pence and Paul Betts,
Introduction, in Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics, ed.
Katherine Pence and Paul Betts (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008),
134.
9 Photographys capacity to shape collective thinking even in recent times is made
evident by the case of photographer Paolo Monti (19081982) and his photographic
campaigns for the promotion of Bolognas historical center preservation campaigns;
see Paolo Monti, La scoperta della citt vuota in Bologna centro storico (Bologna:
Edizioni Alfa, 1970), 5355, and Il censimento fotografico dei centri storici. Modena, di
Paolo Monti, 1973, ed. Piero Orlandi (Modena: Comune di Modena and Istituto per
i Beni Culturali Regione Emilia-Romagna, 1979).
10 On architecture as a media phenomenon, see Hal Foster, Design and Crime: and Other
Diatribes, (London: Verso, 2002), 2742.