Imaging Architecture: the Uses of Photography in the Practice of Architectural History (original) (raw)
Related papers
VRA Bulletin, 2007
The study of architecture has a special and problematic niche within the larger field of art history and visual culture. For many scholars, the complicated terminology of architectural components and the complex mathematics of engineering issues provide a powerful deterrent to engaging with architecture. The vocabulary of architecture is, by and large, not shared with painting and sculpture, although there are some exceptions; for instance, concepts such as texture and lighting are employed in architectural ekphrasis. Beyond the already mentioned engineering issues, formal issues such as massing, proportions, composition, and detailed studies such as profiles and capital analyses share vocabulary with the other arts, but the thrust of the question lies along very different lines. More impenetrable still is the architectural drawing, the abstract rendering in two-dimensions of threedimensional reality, whose conventions are often illegible to the uninitiated. At a fundamental, methodological level, the questions asked of architecture only rarely coincide with those investigated in painting or sculpture. Functional issues of use, social implications, political ramifications, gender questions and religious, devotional repercussions all carry a very different weight in architecture than in painting and sculpture. While these issues are reflected and embedded in other major media, buildings were and are designed to frame and control all these discourses, resulting in architecture being the locus of the lived historical experience, painting and sculpture serving as aspects (among others) of that experience within the building. Thus while the scholarly apparatus surrounding painting and sculpture on one hand and architecture on the other have developed into different organisms, the objects under study belonged together, forming part of the same experiential culture, not just visual in nature but simultaneously encompassing all of the senses, emotions, and intellect.
Intersection of Photography and Architecture—Introduction
Visual Resources, 2011
Visual Resources presents a discussion on the intersection between 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.
2016
Architectural photography that generally aims to be a 'portrait' of a building, in the way of representing its best appearance, often it is far from offering a sense of the architectural experience. Architectural photography can be classified into three basic types, the most representative of the experiential aspect being partial photographs that can recreate our movements and perception as we move in space. Furthermore, few architectural photographs refer to the sense of the materials or how our bodies relate to the physicality of the building. It is often disregarded that buildings like people change in time and have a life story. If photography is usually time-specific, can it, through certain techniques, make us understand the duration in time of an architectural object? This paper will try to affront these aspects and problems of architectural photography.
Studia ethnologica Croatica
The article examines the role of photography in architectural magazines during the 1950s and 1960s, with special focus on the transfers of architectural ideas. By applying an interdisciplinary method that includes a contextual model of visual studies, art, architecture and design history, the article analyzes selected examples to gain insight into the theoretical and cultural-historical foundations and circumstances of the creation and transformation of the visual language of photography in architectural magazines published in the specified period. Instead of (re)constructing the narrative, the roles of photography in the representation of architectural production are studied as a field of complex relations in the field of cultural production. Special attention is paid to specific ways of establishing visual codes of communicating architectural ideas based on photography, created during the 1950s and 1960s in different political and cultural contexts. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the interpretation of architectural photography, from documenting to socially and politically engaged criticism, as well as relativizing the boundaries between architecture and popular culture in the sphere of visual, aesthetic, spatial and ideological aspects of the representational discourse of architectural magazines. This paper is open access and may be further distributed in accordance with the provisions of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 HR licence.
Theorizing the image of architecture
2008
Recent fine art photography has demonstrated a preference for exploring architecture as a subject matter. However, these photographs have seldom been subject to theoretical surveys in direct relation to the architecture they depict. The purpose of this paper is to examine in what ways recent photographs by German artist Thomas Ruff add new meaning to the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. Showing that Ruff’s photographs are both representations of architecture and something more than that, I investigate the nature of the deviation of architectural photography from its starting point through the concepts of haptic and optic vision as pronounced by Alois Riegl and related to photography by Walter
Architectural Photography and the Contingency of History
Inter Photo Arch, Universiity of Navarra, Spain, 2016
Examines the current history of architecture's contingency in the present situation of high security as the attempt to contain the inevitability of history by prediction and anticipation. Contingency is seen as the appearance of a lapse in time in which a potential insecurity can be anticipated. Architecture itself is responsible for insurance against risk and that has led to changes in the use of the architectural camera. Photography becomes securitized under conditions of emergency. Instead of its model in the archival function, architectural photography is absorbed to scanning technologies and automated photographies. The paper refers to the 2005 unveiling of architect Peter Eisenman's Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, as a model in regard of the contingency of the 'late' monument as effect. This effect - of historicity - is subjected to a methodology developed by Reinhardt Koselleck that of 'conceptual' history in Eisenman's practise and also in the work of two contemporary artists, Harun Farocki and Walid Raad. The paper suggests architectural photography develops an ability to represent contingency as interruption to the circuits of exchange. In the ensuing delay, the virtual photographs used by Farocki and Raad create the possibility for the transition of photography into the ethical and political.
Photography's Development Of Architecture
International Journal of Social Sciences, 2021
Knowledge, impression and accumulation of the built environment are rarely acquired through personal experience. Most of the information is just information from photographs. The difference in perception created by the sensory difference between architectural objects produced by visual "idealization" and architectural photographs is the main starting point of this critical research. It is very important to establish a relationship with the representative image of the building in the design process. Refers to the analysis of visual materials in published architectural photographs. The aim of this research is to start with the communication and functions related to the common problems between today's architecture and photography, to understand the representational limitations of photography in architecture and to understand the potential of photography to reproduce space. Within the scope of the research, with the works of some famous photographers who contributed to modern architecture, the contribution of the performance characteristics of photography to the architectural production process and their possible developments will be emphasized. In addition, by observing the evolution of the use of photography in the field of architecture, the symbiotic relationship between photographic expression and design development will be emphasized and the field of architecture will be handled as a two-dimensional document.