Image Building

While the effects that architecture has on photography continue to be nuanced at least within the confines of the framed image, the impact of the latter upon the former is actually more  far reaching than the younger practice is given credit for

- Nick Ramos

Photography and architecture have shared a constantly evolving relationship throughout their common history. It is an association that began with architecture’s early dependency on photography in documenting buildings and has eventually resulted in the current connection in which architects rely heavily upon photography to promote their works and communicate their ideas. Throughout this interaction, one discipline informs, and is in turn informed by the other. It is a constantly changing dynamic that is more intricate, nuanced, and layered than the initial idea of a mechanical transcription of a three dimensional building onto a flat surface would lead one to believe. It is interesting to note how photography, one of the youngest of disciplines, has had profound and long lasting effect upon numerous aspects of one of the oldest, architecture.

Architectural photography is a facile, mimetic discipline that creates representations of structures and spaces that go beyond a simple, direct imprint of the built environment. It can emphasize rhetoric and ideology, reflect shifting mores and politics, as well as to put forth cultural and professional agendas. Photography and architecture are both attended by debates about how, as disciplines, they each hover somewhere between service and art form. Both share an intimate relationship that has always been somewhat in conflict—one that has grown entangled in recent times. While architects and historians continue to utilize photographs as chronicles of artefacts, buildings grow increasingly associated with their photographic images as a result of the emphasis placed today on architecture as a form of mass communication.

A new way of seeing