Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City

Description

Photography and architecture have a uniquely powerful resonance - architectural form provides the camera with the subject for some of its most compelling imagery, while photography profoundly influences how architecture is represented, imagined and produced. Camera Constructs is the first book to reflect critically on the varied interactions of the different practices by which photographers, artists, architects, theorists and historians engage with the relationship of the camera to architecture, the city and the evolution of Modernism. The title thus on the one hand opposes the medium of photography and the materiality of construction - but on the other can be read as saying that the camera invariably constructs what it depicts: the photograph is not a simple representation of an external reality, but constructs its own meanings and reconstructs its subjects. Twenty-three essays by a wide range of historians and theorists are grouped under the themes of ’Modernism and the Published Photograph’, ’Architecture and the City Re-imagined’, ’Interpretative Constructs’ and ’Photography in Design Practices.’ They are preceded by an Introduction that comprehensively outlines the subject and elaborates on the diverse historical and theoretical contexts of the authors’ approaches. Camera Constructs provides a rich and highly original analysis of the relationship of photography to built form from the early modern period to the present day. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Preface Introduction: Architectural and Photographic Constructs SECTION I MODERNISM AND THE PUBLISHED PHOTOGRAPH 1 Frank Yerbury and the Representation of the New 2 Le Corbusier and the Representational Function of Photography 3 The Photo-dependent, the Photogenic and the Unphotographable: How our Understanding of the Modern Movement has been Conditioned by Photography 4 'At Home' with the Eameses 5 Private Vistas and a Shared Ideal: Photography, Lifestyle and the West German Bungalow 6 A Covert Critique of the Architectural Photograph: The Editorial Practice of Andrew Mead SECTION II ARCHITECTURE AND THE CITY RE-IMAGINED 7 Haunted Halls of Mirrors: Photography and the Phenomenology of Emotional Space 8 Photography and the Subject of Architecture 9 'The Synoptic View': Aerial Photographs and Twentieth-Century Planning 10 Negotiating the City Through Google Street View 11 Transforming Ideas into Pictures: Model Photography and Modern Architecture 12 Worlds Collide: Reality to Model to Reality SECTION III INTERPRETATIVE CONSTRUCTS 13 Our Man in Havana: Walker Evans' Photographs for The Crime of Cuba 14 Leafing Through Los Angeles: Edward Ruscha's Photographic Books 15 Looking for the Affect of History in the Photographic Work of Bernd and Hilla Becher 16 Order Out of Chaos: Josef Koudelka's Photographic Constructs 17 Slow Spaces SECTION IV PHOTOGRAPHY IN DESIGN PRACTICES 18 Material Immateriality: Moholy-Nagy's Search for Space 19 Framing the View: The Real and the Imaginary in Photographic Depictions of the Architectural Work of Mies van der Rohe and Eileen Gray 20 Memorability as Image: The New Brutalism and Photography 21 In Defence of Pictorial Space: Stereoscopic Photography and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century 22 Stereoscopy and the Architecture of Visual Space 23 Photography as an Agent of Architectural Proposition and Provocation Index Colour Plates