A principal element in the photography of architecture is one of scale. The box-like camera is a diminutive device in comparison with the much bigger, man-made “boxes” within which we live and work. Acting as a shrinking machine, the camera captures and contains buildings, holding them in stasis. In his book Shooting Space, Elias Redstone surveys the relationship between the two disciplines of photography and architecture.
Largely composed of images, this anthology is divided into five chapters; each starts with a brief introduction and is followed by the work of around ten sel ected photographers. Redstone provides profiles to accompany the photographs, along with a quotation from their makers. The chapters are sandwiched between opening and closing essays by Kate Bush, a curator and writer who is now the head of photography at the Science Museum Group, and Pedro Gadanho, the curator of contemporary architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The dialogue that emerges between these two texts could be used to describe a new discipline: architectural photography.
Bush traces historical precedents for architectural photography as an art form, from Eugène Atget through to Andreas Gursky. This leads the reader to the first featured practitioner, Annie Leibovitz, whose photographs of the New York Times Building under construction (2005-06) can be read as a homage to Lewis Hine and Margaret Bourke-White and their images of skyscraper construction in the 1930s. Although this first chapter deals with the making of monumental buildings, the second focuses on the inhabitants’ feeling of alienation in the built environment. At the close of both chapters, buildings are shown either demolished or abandoned. The photographic record might outlast solid walls.
The chapter at the centre of the book shows architectural infrastructures that sustain and regulate city life: dams and bridges, oilfields and petrol stations, prisons and borders. The overarching theme is man’s scarification of the land. This is architecture as organisation rather than the singular block; the individual becomes lost in this array. Richard Ross’s photographs of segregation cells at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq underline the basic inhumanity of some architectural constructs.
The later chapters distinguish between Modernist and Post-Modernist practice. The photographers featured in the fourth chapter seek to document classic Modernist buildings, concentrating on the formal properties of photography and architecture. In the final chapter, practitioners use Post-Modern techniques of image manipulation to signal an era of post-architecture and post-photography: non-existent buildings appear in fabricated, photographic space. Concluding the survey is Jose Dávila, who physically cuts out buildings from photographs, leaving only their silhouettes. His action in effect negates both building and photograph.
In the relationship between the building and its image that this book explores, it is the miniaturised representation rather than the concrete reality that has sovereignty. In his essay, Gadanho argues that architectural photography has its own autonomy, enabling the practice to move beyond the documentation of architecture. He argues that, as a consequence of photography’s ability to create “its own realities”, the medium can take an active part in the making of buildings. The little box of the camera becomes the projector of an enlarged vision of architectural practice.