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In a close of our upcoming exhibition "Architecture in Photography. Urban Encounter." we will start publishing a series of informative blog posts about this subject. Stay tuned, comment and ask questions! :)
Architectural photography is considered, if not endangered then disappearing type of photographic art: after all, it is much easier to photograph buildings than people. But the simplicity of architectural photography is illusory.
Millions of amateur photographs are able to perfectly convey the appearance of an object, to create a photocopy of it, but in fact this is not a step forward, but backward.
A good architectural photography is a story not so much about a building, but about the society that created it, but also about its time.
The early photographs of the 1860s are indicative in this regard, which show both new buildings with glass roofs and ruins. Despite the different objects, they carry the same message to the viewer: the expectation of a high-tech future. This future symbolizes not only a new style of architecture, but ruins. The ruins embody not sadness, as it was in the era of romanticism, and not regret for the passing world, but joy: after all, the old was destroyed in order to build a new world.
The development of technology has influenced not only the choice of subjects for shooting, but also the status of photographers. If at the end of the 19th century architectural photography was a professional field of activity, then with the improvement of the photography process, the number of amateur photographers began to increase. About a hundred years ago, the process of turning architects into photographers began.
One of the first architects to use the camera in their work was Le Corbusier. Many photographs of buildings and their fragments that he took have survived: some served as a reason for thought, others inspired.
For a while, architecture and photography went hand in hand: architects built, photographers interpreted their creations. The golden era of architectural photography was the era of modernism, when the photographer was a kind of co-author of the architect. And then postmodernism came, and architecture begins to be perceived as a text that cannot be photographed. The genre of photography begins to walk in circles; nothing new has happened since about the 1970s until the early 2000s. And then digital cameras appear - and it turns out that professional architectural photographers can be dispensed with.
Text | Irina Rusinovich