I found all this week’s readings extremely interesting, especially Pierluigi Serraino’s discussion of the class-coded visual lexicon used in architectural photography and James S. Ackerman and Robert Ewall’s retracing of the practice’s roots in landscape paintings, travel literature, engravings, and early photography. Most enlightening, though, were the strange similarities and contrasts between Serraino’s discussion of the parallel careers of the architect and her/his photographer, and Ackerman’s allusion to conservation efforts built around architectural photography. These two uses for images of buildings call to mind two opposite impulses: using photography to immortalize a particular vision of architecture; and using photography as part of an argument for the conservation of the actual building. Photography suddenly serves a double purpose with respect to architecture: freezing a building in a specific time and state for diffusion far from its physical location; and providing evidence of a building’s merit in its particular state and place.
This immediately evoked two Roland Barthes analyses,
The Death of the Author and
Camera Lucida, both of which address an interpretive obsession with authenticity. In the former Barthes questions the necessary validity of authorial intentions, instead arguing that great works of art can and should produce different interpretations upon each reading. In
Camera Lucida, Barthes contemplates the strange temporal dislocations introduced by photography, suggesting that its subjects are inherently ghostly because the moment captured on film is immediately gone. The collaborative artwork of architectural photography, and its use in conservation campaigns introduces an interesting ripple to this discussion.
After all, as we’ve discussed since the beginning of the semester, architecture is among the most polysemic of artworks, its interpretation at least slightly different for each viewer. Architectural photography, especially the variety discussed by Serraino, seems aimed at fixing a building’s interpretation based on one or a series of author-approved images. Here, then, the architectural photographer could be said to be imposing a particular interpretive articulation of a building. As Barthes might put it in
The Death of the Author, architectural interpretation is focused and restrained by the author’s selective photograph imagery. Meanwhile, photography for conservation purposes presents a different, contradictory interpretive paradigm. Here, the image becomes a kind of argument for the importance of the building itself. By highlighting certain unique features and qualities, the architectural conservation photograph presents an argument for the value of the original building. The photograph isn’t intended as an art object in its own right (though it may become one, as Ackerman shows), but instead serves as proof of a (potentially) lost original. Architectural photography, it seems, substitutes itself for the building as the object of interpretive significance. These disjunctures point to a more fundamental question recurring throughout this class: the inherent un-reproducibility of architecture and the persistent obsession with trying to represent it in various mediated reproductions.
This immediately evoked two Roland Barthes analyses, The Death of the Author and Camera Lucida, both of which address an interpretive obsession with authenticity. In the former Barthes questions the necessary validity of authorial intentions, instead arguing that great works of art can and should produce different interpretations upon each reading. In Camera Lucida, Barthes contemplates the strange temporal dislocations introduced by photography, suggesting that its subjects are inherently ghostly because the moment captured on film is immediately gone. The collaborative artwork of architectural photography, and its use in conservation campaigns introduces an interesting ripple to this discussion.
After all, as we’ve discussed since the beginning of the semester, architecture is among the most polysemic of artworks, its interpretation at least slightly different for each viewer. Architectural photography, especially the variety discussed by Serraino, seems aimed at fixing a building’s interpretation based on one or a series of author-approved images. Here, then, the architectural photographer could be said to be imposing a particular interpretive articulation of a building. As Barthes might put it in The Death of the Author, architectural interpretation is focused and restrained by the author’s selective photograph imagery. Meanwhile, photography for conservation purposes presents a different, contradictory interpretive paradigm. Here, the image becomes a kind of argument for the importance of the building itself. By highlighting certain unique features and qualities, the architectural conservation photograph presents an argument for the value of the original building. The photograph isn’t intended as an art object in its own right (though it may become one, as Ackerman shows), but instead serves as proof of a (potentially) lost original. Architectural photography, it seems, substitutes itself for the building as the object of interpretive significance. These disjunctures point to a more fundamental question recurring throughout this class: the inherent un-reproducibility of architecture and the persistent obsession with trying to represent it in various mediated reproductions.
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