How does photography interact with the experience of architecture? Can it articulate something more than the "photographic" nature of a structure?

I sense that photography looks at architecture with deference and with envy. After all, the monumental achievement of building a structure from the ground up finds its opposite in the tool that reproduces ad infinitum a structure that already stands. It might logically follow that the drive to make photographs of architecture must then emanate from the structure, prompted perhaps by its distinct look, engineering accomplishment, or historic significance. From this perspective, follows the belief that a masterful photograph of an architectural work should act as an interpreter, communicating more concretely something of the experience of the space in the round or of the architect’s vision. And yet, in viewing the photograph apart from the structure, it is a visual grammar that persists rather than an architectural one.

If, “the beauty [of architecture] is how you move through the space”, and the photograph will only ever present a single, static perspective, then the structure by virtue of its dimensions obviates the limitation of the photograph. On the one hand, a limited perspective is the photograph’s potential to exploit line and form in a composition that might never be seen while moving through the structure. This bearing however is still steered by the architecture and though the photograph reproduces the structure, it generates a single surface, only the structure’s skin. It is the skin and not the substance. Once divorced from the architectural experience, the photograph elicits readings and misreadings of the structure. Thus, by way of its handicap, it is freed from the burden of acting interpreter of the architecture and instead the structure becomes a vessel for communicating something of photography’s own nature.

Friday, March 4 at 10:54pm

Of course architecture is best experience in-person, over time, and with an understanding of not only the design but also the constraints and context of both.

Other than our in-person experiences, architectural photography has been and remains the most important tool we have to both document and then convey the qualities of the design amongst our industry and to the public.

Ezra Stoller, Julius Shulman, and Balthazar Korab were icons. Having been the three predominant architectural photographers of their era, and the firsts to not only document the final construction but also to interpret the architecture.

They were successful in capturing was not only the structure that was built but creating a lasting vision of the design and lifestyle of that time. We view these photographs today as a portal to another era.

In that sense, yes, architectural photography is capable of capturing more than just the photographic qualities of a structure. Perhaps that ‘something more’ is not quantifiable. Perhaps now the exponential increase in both architectural firms and photographers responsible in this process has increased that these qualities become harder to see.

Architectural photography, like architecture, takes time to age.

Friday, March 4 at 7:51pm

The image eats itself…fascinating!

I’m interested in how photography goes beyond representation to evoke a sense of ruin or relic, and I’ve been exploring this in my own work recently. But for a more philosophical meditation on place, being and photography consider Derrida’s “Athens, Still Remains” — a 1996 essay that accompanies Jean-Francois Bonhomme’s photographs of ruins and structures in Athens, Greece. Derrida argues that the photographic image of a structure (or place) displays a disappearance, and even suggests a kind of death –

“Three deaths, three instances, three temporalities of death in the eyes of photography — or if you prefer, since photography makes appear in the light of the phainesthai, three ‘presences’ of disappearance, three phenomena of the being that has ‘disappeared’ or is ‘gone’: the first before the shot, the second since the shot was taken, and the last later still, for another day, though it is imminent, after the appearance of the print.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=rASrNaRMohoC

An interesting perspective in relation to ancient architecture that already presents itself to us in the form of ruins, but what about photographic representation of the virtual — digital renderings that show us what has not-yet-appeared? Are these like ruins in reverse, foreshadowing disappearance before existence?

Wednesday, March 2 at 12:35pm

Tomas’ point is extremely interesting. The photograph, once seen as just a record of (or, perhaps, a memorial to) the built work, was the means of representing a project in completion (or under construction). But now, as Tomas points out, visualization tools are able to represent “completion” prior to completion. So the photograph as relic/record/memorial takes on different meaning; it is now, oftentimes, a test of the original visualization – an advocate (or denier) of “accuracy”.

For myself, as an architect (and an amateur photographer) the photographs of our own buildings are records of our own experience of design and construction. They are less a conveyor of the space itself and more a new frame for our own experience of imagination and fabrication. To others? I have a hard time answering that question with any authority.

Wednesday, March 2 at 11:33am

I found the introduction to a text that was about “transparency” as a major fiction of photography, as one might state; maybe this might be appropriate to contribute in a very general manner and to trigger some additional view points on the issues you intend to raise; besides the question of if photography articulates something more than the “photographic” nature of a structure” it questions the assumptions both of photography and architecture, since both pre-condition a “subject”: in terms of generating a view and in terms of accessing space. But is this subject an “actual” locality or is it only produced by both the image and the architecture? Is seeing only visual? What has to be “removed” from the concept of seeing, depicting and building to envision a subjectivity that incorporates a gaze that is converted into an image and projected onto (architectural) space?

anyhow, it goes like this:

According to Gilles Deleuze, “State power does not rest on a war-machine, but on the exercise of binary machines which run through us and the abstract machine which overcodes us: a whole ‘police’.” At one point in his well-known book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau looks down from the World Trade Center rooftop, “lifted out of the city’s grasp” where “[h]is elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eve, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.” (Michel de Certeau)
This fiction of knowledge, the exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive—this is the binary machine that runs through us, the abstract machine that overcodes us, classifying, creating polarities, differentiating between the private and the public, between knowledge and insanity, meaning and conviction, enlightenment and conspiracy, representing and creating interpretability, producing meaning. The figure of “transparency” is one epistemic (and ideological) element of these machines. It organizes representation and perception, facilitates viewpoints, and also fosters the “distribution of the sensible” (Jacques Rancière): reality capitulating to the perspective—with the perspective conquering reality—sees what is happening and what should be happening. This perspective “naturally” inscribes itself into the world, evident for instance as an organizational principle of architecture, one further specific distribution of the sensible. It is the vitreous modern and modernist façades—as membranes of the enlightened interconnection of production and reproduction, of the regulation of and in-sight into (social) processes—that forward the manifestation of this ideology of the perspective, of perception, of indexing, surveying and appropriation, of the regulation of “the social,” that is, of access to a “whole police.” They reference a viewpoint reflecting the position of knowledge vis-à-vis the “bewitching” world. Accordingly, transparency can be described as an epistemological concept that corresponds both to the binary machine (seeing everything, not being allowed to see anything) and to the abstract machine (the world as text), which are continually construing particular scopic and gnostic viewpoints that are assembled into the “fiction of knowledge.”

Tuesday, March 1 at 7:21pm

What’s fascinating about this question is how acutely limited its time frame of relevance is. With tools and technologies of architectural (and universal) representation evolving far far far more rapidly than bricks ‘n’ mortar architecture itself, and becoming ever-more-immersive, the distinction between the experience of architecture and the experience of its mediated representation will disappear. Maybe. Once there was much angst about visual culture and the unavoidable culture of the image as something that would consume architecture or turn it into a mere form of consumption. But now, as in so many things, the image eats itself.

Tuesday, March 1 at 4:10pm

As a long time photographer of structures I have been intrigued by the concept of using photography as a tool for landmark preservation. Buildings, that despite being designed by a renowned architect, have fallen victim to destruction by neglect hold a hold particular appeal. Somehow managing to hold on to elements of their original design intent with pieces missing, cracked concrete, rusting steel and layers of graffiti they continue to have a kind of indelible dignity that can be brought out with the photographic image. While the funding for restoration, or even maintenance, may have to wait for another day an argument for the potential that these structures possess can be made today through the cameras eye. Those images can be found in the vistas looking out from the structure and once available to the public or looking inward to capture the expanse of enclosed space that awaits a purpose. Comparatives with historic photos may suggest that at one time there was a creative insight, to host a variety of events, that is absent today.
I can think of no better an example of such a structure, that I have posted about here before, than the New York State Pavilion by Philip Johnson. A picture would be the best way to convey this message, unfortunately attaching an image directly here with html does not appear possible, however this is a link to one: NYSP
I have also just finished a book on the NYSP that I’d be be happy to send a link to anyone interested. Photography is central to the book and fortunately I had help from one of the original contributing architects.

Tuesday, March 1 at 1:07am