I’ve not been much of a fan of the Zoom or Skype conference or the Webinar which have become so common over the lockdown period.  The domestic technology often doesn’t seem up to it.  All that buffering and freezing, the sound breaks and odd pixellations, make me think of Brecht’s Alienation Theory; the idea of disruptive artistic effects to keep the audience at a distance from the theatrical action so they will understand it better.  But when you aren’t in the theatre the effects become unintended – so at a Zoom call I spend a lot of time distracted by the technology and its strangeness.

So when I read the 20th Century Society's most recent newsletter with a plug for a webinar about architectural photography my first thought was to give it a miss.  But it was free and convenient so I decided there was little to lose and I’m pleased I did because I really enjoyed it.  There is something so beguiling about sitting quietly in a room while someone displays interesting images and talks authoritatively about them.

The speaker in this case was Valeria Carullo, Photographs Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects and the talk consisted largely of a gentle walk-through the RIBA photography archive.  I hadn’t realised that this is digitised and online (at RIBApix) so anyone can access it – and  RIBA allow use of low-res images for non-profit making purposes so the photos below (unless otherwise noted) are courtesy of that very generous permission.  As ever with photography, it turns out that there is not only a history in the chronological sense but also a sort of history of a history in the cultural sense – the idea that is not so clear whether photography records reality or creates it.

You might say that the oldest known photograph, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, was architectural.  It has that combination of form and light and line which characterises so much of the genre.

The talk started with the commercial architectural photographers who had started to operate by the middle of the 19th century when the medium was first used to illustrate structural processes and to keep accurate records. The style was documentary: flat light, vistas, no shadows, as much detail as possible – following perhaps the style of architectural plans, elevations and sectional drawings as you can see below.

The suggestion in the talk was that in comparison to the Cartesian rigour of the French Missions Héliographiques (a French project to record and restore important historical buildings) the British took a rather more romantic approach at the time (such as the image by Francis Bedford, to the right).

Technological developments such as gelatin dry plates and half-tone printing made both the photography and press reproduction of the images much simpler and the medium then became a major vehicle for promoting the idea of ‘architecture’. By the 1920s, as photography tried to find a visual language unique to itself, architectural photographers experimented not only with the dramatic use of light and shadow but also with viewpoints, a sense of geometry and diagonals - like this shot of the Midland Hotel in Morecambe. (The hotel was refurbished and reopened a few years ago and I had a pleasant stay in it shortly after. There’s an Eric Ravilious mosaic in the entrance lobby.)

People started to feature too. Zoltan Seidner’s image to the right is very suggestive of a new and modern life and could be seen as propaganda, aspiration, futurism or simply wishful thinking.

I’m going to have to put in one of my all time favourite photos here which is René Burri’s 1960 shot of the Health Ministry in Brasilia.  I see this as architectural photography even though the building is implied rather than depicted.  There is such an air of optimism, of standing on a historical threshold.  (I know: the way those guys are looking at those gals is not very woke.  But have a heart – it’s timeless, for heaven’s sake.)  Here photography seems to be communicating ideas and ideals and is used as a vehicle not so much of record as of interpretation. Two dimensions can never equal three, natch, but they can condense them.

This suggestion of a new futuristic life for which modernist architecture was such a standard-bearer ran in tandem however with a rather less noble suggestion in the later 20th century:  that the role of photography is to sell architecture. “I sell architecture better and more directly and more vividly than the architect does,”  is a well-known quote from Julius Shulmann a renowned architectural photographer who took the image below. But that approach is not without its downside.

“This tradition represents a highly circumscribed interpretation of buildings: rather than emphasizing how commercial and domestic spaces normally function, the photographs present an ‘architectural’ idea, one in which light is used to articulate form and space, and where use is symbolized by the presence of  a few carefully placed objects on the pristine surfaces of tables and counters.” *

I think we will all recognise that description and I am sure we have all permitted ourselves a little snigger at such images – yet no matter how idealised they are, they seem to be entirely unironic even now.  The advent of colour photography in the 1970/80s and of digital imagery over the last couple of decades has put so much wind in the sails of this tendency that we now have the suggestion – articulated by Valeria Carullo at the end of her talk – that buildings are being designed to look good on Instagram.  So the photo becomes more important than the reality. I don’t know whether that is true but I doubt whether the endless idealisation of buildings through photography will serve the interests of architecture well in the long run. A building is a building and a photograph is a photograph. A photo of a cathedral may be very beautiful but it will never be the same as being in a cathedral.

although it’s a bit outside the theme of the talk, what I do find intriguing these days is how often now you can walk past a construction site and see almost life-sized images on the site hoardings of what is being built.  Here’s one I took locally.  You might see it as very political - these young, healthy, slim, active leisurely stereotypes: the dog walkers, the cyclists, the strolling family. I do have my doubts about that seemingly very tall chap in the middle picture window though; he’s a bit off-key. Hasn’t he got anything better to do than ogle the streetscape while he drinks his coffee? I find him a bit creepy.

Then there is the full building wrap, like the one to the right there. Is that a photograph of a building or is it a photograph of a photograph? Either way it seems to be the future. It’s a fascinating tendency.  Sometimes the wrap is of the building which has not yet been built! It is the photograph-before-the-fact, an image which calls reality into being. That suggests rather strongly to me that photography – well, the digital image, anyway – is not recording reality but has a big hand in inventing it.

Great talk by Valeria Carullo and I didn’t even have to go to London for it!

* The Oxford Companion to the Photograph: Ed. Robin Lenman, OUP 2005, p.45