Architectural Photography

Definition

Architectural photography is the practice and tradition of documenting buildings through the camera, spanning from 19th-century pioneers (Henry Fox Talbot, Charles Nègre) through Bauhaus documentarians (Lucia Moholy), photojournalists (John Donat, René Burri), and contemporary image-makers (Iwan Baan, Helene Binet, Julius Shulman, Sebastian Weiss). The field is defined by a core tension between the dominant convention of the idealized, depopulated "photogenic moment" that "visually downplays habitation, use and context" (Coward), and a documentary counter-tradition that seeks to "let people in" and show buildings as inhabited settings of everyday life.

Key Thinkers

• Iwan Baan — the contemporary exemplar of narrative, anti-idealizing architectural photography; documents buildings after the architect departs, when people "take over" the structure.
• (Related, not yet paged: Henry Fox Talbot, Charles Nègre, Lucia Moholy, John Donat, David Coward — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Instagrammability — the sanitized, hyper-beautiful image logic that architectural photography's documentary tradition resists; AI-generated images with "Instagram-face" accelerate this logic.
• Iconic Architecture — the building type whose photographic representation is contested between idealized spectacle and inhabited function.
• Spectacle — the image-world that architectural photography negotiates, alternately serving and subverting it.
• Star Architecture — the commissioning context whose products are the frequent subjects of architectural photography.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Building the Picture: The Story of Architectural Photography
• Visuality Peaks, Function Lasts
• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — photography as the interior view's successor — and its own obsolescence: the view-genre was "rendered obsolete by the development of a photographic camera capable of focusing on a great depth of field and thus able to do the job of the interior view-painter much more quickly and no less efficiently"; the photographic albums of 1880–1910 then supplied "an invaluable picture of decorating taste in the period 1880–1910, before they too were forgotten, like the albums of paintings they had superseded" (Gere, quoted, pp. 287–288) — the interior's evidentiary media recurrently obsolescent; the albums' shift "from being familial possessions to becoming historical, and therefore public, documents" (p. 288); and, with Praz's rediscovery, the photograph-album as the evidence-base whose transparency the essentialist history assumed.
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — the interior's photographic regime: Pile's history presents interiors "predominantly… through photographs, as objects (albeit inside-out ones) largely denuded of that 'great range of objects'" they actually contain — the construction of these images "is not discussed, as if they were transparent evidence of the interiors depicted." Charles Rice's counter-claim (via the same source): representations construct interiors on a two-dimensional surface, not merely record them.
• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the interior photograph as a genre, not a record: the editors' headnote — "Recognising that the original photographs utilise techniques and strategies of street photography, Fuss and Sanders suggest that this private chamber of close and personal exchange, of intimate interiorities, is turned inside out for public display via the photographic images" (p. 117) — the archival photograph of Freud's office analyzed for its technique (street photography's framing of private exchange) rather than its transparency; and the photograph as the interior's double: the framed portraits "hanging at the exact same level as the mirror," with the patient's disembodied head "homologous… to the framed photographic portraits above them" (p. 118). See mirror, privacy, interiority.
• Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the photograph as the interior's only surviving body, and as evidence: Edmund Engelman's 1938 photographs of Berggasse 19 "taken… just before the family left Vienna, exhibited today in the empty rooms" — the photograph promoted to exhibit when the interior it recorded is gone; the 1932 Hohe Warte photograph (couch, armchair and rugs moved to the summer residence) as "proof that Freud considered this arrangement vital to his practice" — the photo functioning as documentary proof of a design intention; and the reconstructed setting's clues being "found in black-and-white photographs… in written descriptions by his patients… and in the museum context of his final home" — photographs as one of three archives from which a demolished arrangement can be reconstructed. Where Fuss & Sanders read the photograph's technique, Spankie relies on its testimony: the interior photograph as evidence in the reconstruction of a lost interior. See psychoanalytic-setting, house-museum.
• Time travel (Massey 2018) — the installation photograph as the interior's time vehicle, and the frozen moment as the convention to break. Massey's set piece is Richard Hamilton's August 1957 photograph of the an Exhibit installation: "This is the past, a photograph, an image, a fleeting moment frozen in time, never to happen again" — one afternoon "captured, unique and ephemeral," Perspex sheets over imperial neoclassicism. Read in plurality — Hamilton's 1957 beside the Paintings from Haiti installation of 1951 and Parallel of Life and Art of 1953, against the constant French windows — the frozen moments reconstitute a room's sixteen-year temporal life (plurality-of-befores-and-afters, time-travel); and the images are openly non-transparent evidence: "selected to evoke a certain atmosphere, allowing us to travel back in time." Against the architectural convention of the interior as "a freshly constructed, shiny new entity, usually without inhabitants in a fixed moment of time," the installation photograph is the image of the interior in use — its inhabitants, overcoats, rationing-era chill, and bare floorboards included. See ephemeral-interior, interior-architecture.
• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the photograph as spatial document and the triple-removal critique. Two registers: the photograph's temporality — Batchen's photograph-time ("to look at a photograph is therefore to experience a temporal movement back and forth between past and present; it is to witness the passing of time in general") applied to the preserved studio, whose "then and now" comparisons of 1980s and recent photographs reveal that "it is merely Whiteley's presence in the photograph that reveals the time frame in which they were taken"; and Demand's photographic critique — full-scale paper models of event-spaces photographed and destroyed, "the photographs… triple removed from the scenes or objects they depict," "saturated" with "madeness" (Fried) yet "devoid of evidentiary traces and marks of human use," so that "due to their different form they do not 'make a claim over the real'" — photography's own assumption of authenticity as the thing critiqued. Where Massey's photographs are time vehicles, Demand's are time's removals; both refuse the transparent image. See spatial-document, post-factum-model, white-cube.

Open Questions

• Can Baan's documentary approach to architectural photography resist recuperation into the same spectacular economy of images it critiques, or does "humanity" in images itself become a marketable aesthetic?
• What happens to architectural photography as AI image generation learns from photographers' databases — does the tradition bifurcate into the real (indexical) and the simulated (generative)?
• Rice's critique targets the survey history's photographic transparency — does the same critique apply to the contemporary icon economy, where the Instagram image of a building is treated (by metrics, by branding) as transparent evidence of its iconicity?
• Rice's primary text (via Gere) adds obsolescence to transparency: the camera that killed the view-painter produced albums that "too were forgotten, like the albums of paintings they had superseded." Is the interior's photographic evidence therefore doubly compromised — non-transparent when made, and illegible when its regime dies — and what does the current regime's future forgetting do to the wiki's own image-based sources? See interior-view.