courtesy The Architects Journal
documentation complicity critique process collaboration
architectural journals | imaging by robin wilson
fragmenting the architectural photograph a critical contribution to the architectural media
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A generic form of architectural photography dominates the platforms of architectural criticism within the architectural media. The generic image prioritises a supposed legibility of architectural form using the precision of medium or large- format cameras, corrected perspectives and carefully deployed, directional light. Whilst often technically rigorous, the mandate of the generic image is limited to witnessing the building at its optimum moment of completeness when the built reality most closely resembles the authored conception of its design as a technical drawing or rendering. Architectural photography is thus often criticised for failing to represent architecture as process – spatial, material or social. However, perhaps the most intractable problem with the architectural photograph is not its form as such – which, after all, originally evolved in the nineteenth century from the conventions of architectural drawing – but rather its condition of dominance within the media; its hegemonic status as the official way to see architecture. The
architectural photograph is deployed through a media system defined by an essentially complicit relationship between architects and the industry’s media professionals (journalists, editors, photographers). Architectural photography facilitates this structure of complicity as a form of photographic representation that postures as objectivity, and which is all too easily, and passively, received as a faithful version of architectural reality. How might we contribute to a media system characterised by such a systemic closure of critique? Should we abandon the architectural journals altogether, or find ways to recuperate some form of critical space within them? For my part, I advocate continued engagement with the media in the belief that the building report – the documentation and analysis of a new architectural system in image and text – presents a complex interdisciplinary and collaborative challenge – a worthy site for resistance to formulae, cliché and commodification.
above: wrap cover for The Architects’ Journal , 12|04|07, Number 14, Volume 225. Unusually, the editors suspended the use of advertising on the back cover to accommodate Green’s fragment photographs.
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