ESSAY

ARCHITECTURAL
PHOTOGRAPHY
IH THEAGEOF
SOCIAL MEDIA
Disseminated by smart phones
andlnstagram, critical photography
thrives online. Bnt can it change
the way we look at buildings?
TOM WILKINSON

ARI JANUARY 2015 91

ESSAY
I. (P re v io u s page)
P ro fe s s o r L a r r y S p ec k
p u b lis h ed im ag e s o f
Z a h a H a d id 's c ru m b lin g
G u ang zhou O p e ra on his
blog, a s k in g w h y su ch a
t e r r ib ly fin is h e d b u ild in g
w o n a design a w a rd fro m
A r c h it e c tu r a l R e c o rd
2 & 3 . J o h n D o n a t bro u g h t
a p h o to jo u rn a lis t's
s e n s ib ility t o h is w o rk ,
w h ic h sp an n ed F o s te r’s
W illis F a b e r b u ild in g
in Ip s w ic h an d slu m s
in W h ite c h a p e l
4 & 5 . S h o rtly a f t e r he
a r riv e d in B rita in , th e A R
h ire d L a s zlo M o h o ly -N a g y
to desig n a sp e c ia l seasid e
iss u e (J u ly 1 9 3 6 )
in c o r p o r a tin g ‘N e w
V is io n ' s ty le p h o to g rap h y
92 AE I JANUARY 2015
Photography, Walter Benjamin observed in 1985,
unshackles buildings from their sites, and as a
consequence ‘the cathedral leaves its place to be received
in the studio of the art-lover’.1 But in the process
architecture, which he called the prototype of a collective
art, is privatised. And where it had previously been
perceived tactilely, in a state of habitual distraction -
a good thing, in Benjamin’s opinion, since this deflected
the cult-like devotion lavished on artworks - it was
transformed into precisely that: an object of
contemplation, and a commodity to boot. If architecture
was the prototype of a collective art, for Benjamin the
up-to-date version was not still photography, but cinema.
However his contemporaries cast doubts on his utopian
dreams of film’s revolutionary potential - justifiable
doubts, it turned out.2 Benjamin, a German Jew,
was writing on the topic from Parisian exile, and five
years later he killed himself as he fled a regime skilled
as none other in the manipulation of images, not least
images of architecture.
That photography —considered as art - continues
to do dubious things to buildings is demonstrated by the
current Constructing Worlds exhibition at the Barbican,
where buildings, famous or otherwise, are turned into
icons, each housed in its own devotional aedicule.
There are the Shulman photographs of the Eameses’ work,
which look like high-class estate agents’ shots, and take
architecture’s commodification to a delirious extreme,
but even the everyday surfaces of Stephen Shore - even
‘Photographs showing unflattering
angles, frustrated users, shoddy finishes,
premature ruination and fuck-the-
neighbours attitude, are still invisible,
at least in the architectural press’
the conceptual, determinedly anti-aesthetic work
ofEdRuscha - are made to look like an affirmation
of the title of Albert Renger-Patzsch’s book (which
so appalled Benjamin): ‘the world is beautiful’.3
Trash turns into tinsel and muddy water into limpid
streams via the refracting crystal of the lens. The result
is ruin porn, slum pom: Took on my works, ye mighty,
and drool’. The question of why we, myself included,
love to ogle the damaged and decaying is a knotty one.
While we might charitably say it springs from a desire
to escape the smooth perfection of capitalist spectacle,
it risks becoming exactly what Johnny Rotten sang:
a cheap holiday in other people’s misery. The idea that
images of iniquity can spur the viewer to action is utopian
- there is no necessary or immediate connection between
stimulus and response. Without the accompaniment of
critical text, abject images are ambiguous, and potentially
just a form of exploitation that aims to deliver aesthetic
pleasure or the warm buzz of pity.4
Could it be, however, that the new media have finally
achieved Benjamin’s dream of a collectivised mode
of seeing? Does the new photography of architecture,
captured on smartphones and instantly distributed to
a mobile network of viewers, with each node capable of
interaction rather than languishing in bovine receptivity
- does this represent a re-collectivisation of the way
we look at reproductions of building? A re-socialisation
of architectural reception? A means of representing
the abject without fetishising it?
Motivations for transforming architecture’s
representations and its audiences are not hard to find.
The reification of buildings by photographers, their
commodification, their fragmentation and isolation from
context, the way they are stripped of humans and marks
of use, sterilised, and transformed into receptacles for
capital investment - has long been the subject of criticism.
Even the most biting analytical text has its fangs blunted
when accompanied by seductive centrefolds. Too often,
architectural photographers see their job as representing
what the architect intended, not what the architect built
- or what the user encounters (these might be three
entirely different things). The result is the photographic
equivalent of architectural drawings, with the camera
sent back in a time machine, beyond the sometimes
disappointing moment of realisation into the mists
of ideation. The effects seep into the profession itself: a
feedback loop is established between reproduction and
production, to the extent that some buildings are evidently
built as images, and utility goes out of the window.
But despite the familiarity of this critique, editors
(myself included) and photographers are so enmeshed
in the institutional networks of architectural production
that critical images have been subjected to an iconoclastic
AH I JANUARY 2015 93
Iff pl/tl
1 Jjj

Is
••-■' 7%»vW j ' ‘‘^ j j I
*l<aRpJP4' *■* *. v
z _ T i r %. 1 !
- r.

05 -jW r"nr JL'figp ,3

C -jH k s

; k "»' £,

n |k li |M

H J A jl
"#
ESSAY
6 . (Opposite) a selection
from th e thousands of
am ateur images o f the
Parthenon on Flickr, which
provides a global survey
of the way we see buildings
7. C ritic Oliver W ainw right
regularly posts images of
inept architectural details
on his T w itte r account,
such as this guttering
from Gehry's Fondation
Louis V uitton in Paris
8 . Douglas M urphy
reported on a visit to
Gateshead on his blog,
com plete w ith images
revealing the inelegant
backside of Norman
Foster’s Sage Gateshead
taboo. Photographers want to take attractive photos
(their careers depend on it after all), and they won’t
get invited back by architects they’ve exposed. Editors
want people to consume their magazines, which should,
therefore, look delicious. Alternatives have been tried
- and abandoned. The AR employed Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
in the 1930s to produce layouts in which architectural
details, shot from crazy ‘New Vision’ angles, pop through
cut-outs in the page. The AR also has a long tradition of
printing what Robert Elwall called ‘polemical snapshots’,5
such as Ian Nairn’s endless telegraph poles for Outrage
and John Donat’s socially engaged work. This tendency
came to a head with the infamous Manplan campaign,
which began in 1969 and lasted for eight issues - until
the outraged response of architects and Hubert de Cronin
Hastings’ own editorial team (but not subscribers, as Steve
Parnell recently revealed) led to Thermidorean reaction.
In any case, looking over Manplan now it becomes clear
that, for all the protopunk graphics and the pugnacious
chutzpah of the grimy monochrome, this was the work
of angry old men. H de C’s accompanying essays are
the words of a conservative revolutionary, dismayed
by the modern world and keen to turn the clock back to a
picturesque past: a wish that jarred with his chosen mode
of representation, which has an inadvertent voluptuousness,
seducing the viewer with its grain and silvery tone.
More recently, after many years of absence, the
AR has reinserted humans into the images it publishes,
and frequently represents buildings behaving badly in
their contexts (see, for instance, Gehry’s Fondation Louis
Vuitton rearing over the Bois de Boulogne, or Piano’s
ill-conceived additions to Ronchamp). Our Revisit series
attempts to recover the temporal dimension neglected
by journalism’s slavery to the news cycle, and our
covers, over the last few months, have purposely abjured
manicured glamour shots in favour of the oblique and the
occasionally unsettling. Nevertheless, photographs that
show unflattering angles, frustrated users, shoddy finishes,
premature ruination and fuck-the-neighbours attitude, are
still generally invisible, at least in the architectural press.
Online, on the other hand, a blizzard of images blows
through the ether - images good, bad, and indifferent.
There are blogs, there are Instagram feeds, there are
Flickr pools and Facebook albums. People share images attempt direct marketing by tweeting images of their own
by email, SMS and WhatsApp, and comment on pictures buildings, Dezeen regurgitates glamour shots from the
on other people’s accounts. Does this represent the architectural PR machine, and Flickr’s endless amateur
glorious unfolding of a real architectural public, where hour is stuffed full of examples of what Pierre Bourdieu
discourse blooms unshackled from institutional fetters? called the ‘middlebrow art’: images aping the professional
Or could it be said that, though the ecology of online canon, all rendered in emetic HDR (High Dynamic Range).
publishing is a lush and thriving jungle, what seem And where exactly is the social element in the so-called
at first glance to be the green shoots of freedom grow in social-media? Are we reduced to ‘liking’ Twitter posts, like
fact from ground fertilised with filthy lucre? Architects caged rats relentlessly pawing the button that releases one
more tiny hit of socially secreted dopamine? To appending
‘The new photography of architecture is the words ‘nice capture’, followed by a thumbs-up emoji,
to yet another carbon copy picture of the Parthenon
captured on smartphones and distributed on Flickr —an image that, bar its psychedelic colouring,
to a mobile network of viewers, with each could have been taken 150 years ago? Substantial critique
node capable of interaction —but is this and reasoned debate are hard to achieve in 140 characters,
a form that favours instead bad-tempered put-downs.
are-collectivisation of the way we look Star photographers like Iwan Baan who resort to the new
at images of buildings?’ media - Baan’s favoured forum is Instagram, where he has
A R | JA N U A R Y 2015 95
 ESSAY
9 . O w e n H a t h e r l e y ’s
b lo g f e a t u r e d e x c u r s io n s
t h r o u g h t h e r u in s o f
n e o lib e r a l B r i t a i n , s u c h
a s t h e i n f a m o u s 'B r a d f o r d
h o le ', a s i t e l e f t e m p t y
s in c e 2 0 0 8 a f t e r a s c h e m e
b y m a ll-b u ild e r W e s t fie ld
w a s p a u s e d in r e s p o n s e
to t h e fin a n c ia l c ra s h
1 0 . L a r r y S p e c k ’s im a g e
s h o w s t h e m a s t i c h o ld in g
t o g e t h e r t h e w in d o w s
o f th e G u an g zh o u O p e ra
11. ( O p p o s it e ) a s e le c t io n
o f im a g e s fr o m A s if K h a n
a n d D a v i d K n ig h t 's b lo g
s h o w in g a r c h i t e c t u r a l
a d a p t a t io n s , in c lu d in g
a 'b u m -p r o o fe d ' c o rn e r
a n d a T a v o r a fo u n ta in
in P o r t o m o d i f ie d
by s k a te rs
96 AR I JANUARY 2015
23,000 followers - aren’t so much interested in engaging
their public in the creative process, as in cultivating their
own professional images as roving eyes, always with a
shoeless child at hand to buff th at aura of social concern
th a t goes down so well with famous clients (but doesn’t
translate into depictions of their projects, naturally). His
adoption of the demotic helps explain his popular success:
he employs the casual visual language of the hobbyist, and
his favouring of camera phones has been widely reported
- he ju st happens to point his from a helicopter.
The lack of critical analysis in this trade in images is
a glaring one: Tumblr blogs such as Fuck Yeah Brutalism
may occasionally bring the odd unexpected gem to light,
and spark ponderings about the vanishing heritage of this
widely reviled style, but there are no connections made
between these pictures, and very little said of them. Even
supposedly critical photo blogs, such as Unhappy Hipsters
- which collects real-estate photos starring bearded white
yuppies - fail when it comes to text, since the ‘satirical’
captions are about as funny and as biting as a humorous
greetings card. At best, Tumblr is an archive, and nothing
more; at their worst, Tumblr blogs are lightly ‘curated’
composts of disconnected visual platitudes, a perfect
illustration of gape-mouthed Forrest Gump-style
sentimentality. Gee the world sure is beautiful.
There are alternatives. Even simple image aggregator
blogs can, by means of repetition, build up a kind of
thematic integrity: architects Asif Khan and David
Knight, for instance, maintain a photo-blog titled AAND D
which records the traces left by inhabitation on buildings
and urban spaces, provoking reflections on what it means
to use architecture. For a couple of years, Kieran Long
pseudonymously disseminated images of terrible buildings
on his blog B ad British Architecture, revealing a whole
substratum of poor design th at rarely gets mentioned, let
alone depicted, in the mainstream press; even B uilding
Design's Carbuncle Cup tends to favour the superlatively
awful, or bad works by big names, whereas the banality on
show on B ad British Architecture was its raison d’etre, and
reminiscent, in th at sense, of Nairn’s strategy of bringing
the ignored to light. In a similar vein, but more analytical,
are the blogs of Owen Hatherley and Douglas Murphy,
where they launched their own careers as w riters by
recording journeys around British towns to reveal - via
‘Where is the social element in the
so-called social-media? Are we reduced
to ‘liking’ Twitter posts, like caged rats
pawing the button that releases one more
tiny hit of socially secreted dopamine?’
their own, admittedly inexpert photography - the decay
of the country’s urban centres under neoliberal policy.0
The internet has something to offer even a broadsheet
critic like the Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright. Though
he’s not shy of publishing critical opinions of big-name
architects, he has to resort to Twitter to show the
images th at justify his critique, while his articles in print
and on the Guardian website are accompanied by a
combination of promo shots and architecturally illiterate
photojournalism. There are exceptions to this: for instance,
his recent collection of images of facade retention schemes,
many of them solicited via Twitter, was published online
by his official home. Yet on the whole, critical photography’s
online exile is general - and as Professor Larry Speck
points out on his blog, this leads to the situation in
which the Guangzhou Opera House can get garlanded
with construction awards and depicted like Aphrodite
freshly sprung from the waves - whereas, in reality it is,
as reported in the D aily Telegraph, ‘falling apart’.
W hat are the solutions to this photographic apartheid?
In an era in which print quakes before the online hydra,
editors are justifiably reluctant to rock the boat or
risk producing what looks like a substandard product.
But - leaving the ethical argument aside - might
there not be a case for product differentiation inhering
precisely here, in the interstices between Arch,Daily and
Wallpaper*? The levelling promised by electronic media’s
more enthusiastic advocates turned out to have a distinct
democratic deficit as the hierarchies of the old media
were transposed into the new; figures of authority in
print replicate this authority online, for instance Oily
Wainwright with his 14,000 followers on Twitter, or the
AR with its Tumblr of architectural drawings, followed
by 170,000. Expertise clearly still has an audience, but
in visual m atters its successful communication depends
on a non-contradictory visual strategy. The argument
for a further enfolding of what the internet can do into
the old media would seem clear: it’s time for a return
of the polemical snapshot to architectural journalism.
1. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility’, Selected Writings, Vol 3 (Harvard University Press,
2006), 101-33,103.
2. Theodor Adorno et al, Aesthetics and Politics (Verso, 2007), 120-6.
3. Renger-Patzsch’s book of photographs Die Welt ist Schon was
published in 1928. Ironically, the title was actually an invention of his
publisher: Renger-Patzsch had wanted to call it Die Dinge (Things).
4. Martha Rosier, ‘In, Around and Afterthoughts (On Documentary
Photography)’ (1981), in Richard Bolton (ed), The Contest of Meaning:
Critical Histories o f Photography (MIT Press, 1992), 303-42.
5. Robert Elwall, Building with Light (Merrell, 2004), 162.
6. Both Hatherley and Murphy wrote on this topic in 2012,
eliciting an indignant response from Dezeen asserting the value
of their (then) virtually text-less site. Dezeen have since employed
Hatherley as a columnist.
 -
a-; tr
H
E
* u t v ■ #
^K§£
-■ S'
Jr9?
g f # > •"*
fa X=^8

JP' il^B