Photography has a clear relationship to architecture: the documentation of space for those who are unable to experience it. It provides an opportunity for people to understand the physical relationships of a certain situation. Its use allows architects to publish their work, for news agencies to inform the public, and for google to document the world. Slowly, the physicality of the world is collected in images and stored in databases, accessible to everyone.
Backwards and forwards.
Architects rely on representational forms of art to design. Drawings, models, virtual reality, and photography enable viewers to understand architecture they cannot experience. The architecture lives in an imagined arena manifested by each representation. Viewers piece together this information and create their own imagination of the architecture. Each medium creates a different understanding of the architecture that another medium cannot give. None of the mediums, however, allow a viewer to understand the architecture as an experienced reality. More interestingly, the experienced architecture will not tell you what a drawing or photograph can tell you.
Each medium edits reality and displays the most pertinent information that the medium can explain. A plan of a building allows us to understand the circulatory relationships between spaces, their various sizes, etc. A plan, however, cannot help us to experience to the architecture, it enables us to understand a holistic interpretation of various aspects of the architecture. A plan is important, however, because experiencing architecture will not make such relationships obvious.
These images are both inside and outside.
Photography, on the other hand, can only document the reality of the world, not our imagined proposals for it. In architecture, photography comes after the fact, once the design (the imagination phase) is complete. It is used to document the product and to inform people about the architecture.
A house in Mongolia is not important unless it has been photographed. This same house in Mongolia need not be visited if it can be seen in a photograph. The house has become important because of the photograph, but at the same time the photograph denies the importance of experiencing the house. The photograph of the house is more important than the architecture of the house.
These are dark.
I think it is important for architects to challenge photography’s assertion over the reality of architecture. The process of creating a photograph alters reality. A few examples include the altered perception of time, the flattening of space into two dimensions, viewing the world from a single viewpoint, and the distortion the camera lens creates. These are aspects, among many others, that separate the medium of photography from the reality it represents.
These are also the aspects which make photography an interesting medium. I think it is interesting that unlike any other medium, photography begins with reality. It alters and distorts many spatial relationships, but it must always have the trace of the real located within its representation. Unlike drawing or painting, the essence of photography is its distorting relationship to the real world.
My ffffound
