Architecture has always exerted a powerful visual appeal, even if that is not the prime reason for its creation. After all, it is ranked not among the visual, but among the useful arts. A building which sends every onlooker into raptures but makes for dismal use is a failure as a building.
Buildings are, nevertheless, there for all to see. But do we always see quite what we are looking at? Are we not frequently astonished by things that may have escaped our attention for years but are captured – or better, discovered – by photographers? Of course they have an advantage over us, because in the course of their work they are able to see the world in a frame, at least at second glance. The viewfinder is an unmatchable aid in their efforts to reproduce an object, placing it within our focus. Why, then, are there at least three different ways to photograph architecture?
There are some photographers who are commissioned by architects to record their brand new products, straight off the drawing-board, in literally virgin condition, before they are effaced for ever, even spoiled or disfigured, once the things are done to them for which they were actually constructed: by owners, tenants, office workers, factory hands, visitors – in short, whoever lives, works, celebrates, holds court or gets drunk in the place. Photographs of this genre, cold and aesthetic, usually have something aseptic and alien about them.
Then there are photographers who see with everyday eyes – the reporters, we might call them. Their visual curiosity is provoked less by a beautiful, perhaps exceptional architecture than by what happens inside it. People mean more to them than the design features of the structure or the atmosphere of the spaces created within.
