Imaging Architecture: the Uses of Photography in the Practice of Architectural History (original) (raw)

Photography in architectural history is often used in a highly conventional manner, simply to depict, describe or identify the buildings under discussion. This paper, which provides a critical overview of the use of photographic imagery within the academic practices of teaching and publishing architectural history, considers alternative imaging strategies -dialectical imaging and temporality -to show how various social, political and other meanings of architecture may be created by photographs as well as by the written word. Concepts derived from Brecht, Benjamin and Hildebrand are used to expand on notions of the dialectic and temporality, and the latter in particular is developed into sub-categories of the everyday, the event, dissemination and the narrative.