Constructing Worlds: Photography & Architecture

Ever since 1827, when Nicéphore Niépce made the first permanent photograph - a record of the view of the rooftops outside his studio window - architecture and photography have enjoyed an intimate relationship. Constructing Worlds, a major new exhibition at London’s Barbican Gallery, offers a survey of 18 photographers whose work has focussed on the built environment: a selection addressing subjects ranging from the American mid-west of the 1930’s to the now rapidly emerging cities in the Middle East.

The purposes for which these images were made are no less diverse. Some, like Luigi Ghirri’s dream-like portraits of Aldo Rossi’s cemetery at Modena and Lucien Hervé’s abstract depictions of Le Corbusier’s High Court of Justice at Chandigarh represented direct commissions from architects. However, in the more recent work of figures like Simon Norfolk and Bas Princen, photography serves as a critical tool revealing buildings not as the architect might wish them to be depicted but rather as registers of violence and decay.

Bernice Abbott

In 1929, Bernice Abbott returned to her native America after eight years in Paris and was struck by the dramatic transformation New York had undergone in her absence. Over the following decade she produced a portfolio of nearly a 1000 images of the city – representing one of the greatest documents of the metropolis in the making.

Iwan Baan

Better known as a photographer of contemporary architecture, Iwan Baan’s contribution to Constructing Worlds comprises a photo-essay documenting the illegal inhabitation of an office block in downtown Caracas which was abandoned mid-construction in the 1990’s. Baan’s photographs pay tribute to the ingenuity of the building’s residents and the surprisingly generous living environment that their act of colonization created.

Hélène Binet

Hélène Binet, describes her 1997 images of the then still under construction Jewish Museum in Berlin as a “dialogue between two boxes”: one, her large-format camera and the other, Daniel Libeskind’s building. Both are closed volumes punctured by apertures. Binet’s images depict the drama of the moment when light is permitted to enter.

Simon Norfolk

Simon Norfolk’s work documents the effects of war on the built environment. He photographed Afghanistan shortly after the allied invasion’s defeat of the Taliban in 2001 and returned a decade later, to depict the consequences of a decade of occupation. Often making ironic references to picturesque depictions of ruins encountered in the work of artists like Claude Lorrain, these bleak images portray a world in which both architecture and civilisation are at a point of collapse.

Bas Princen

Captured at moments of incompletion and robbed of any sign of human life, the buildings that we encounter in Bas Princen’s photographs beg the question as to whether they are construction sites or ruins. Lonely presences in an inhospitable world, they testify both to the violence involved in making architecture and to nature’s implacable determination to reassert itself.

Julius Shulman

Throughout the 1950’s, Julius Schulman made a series of highly staged images depicting the programme of prototype Case Study Houses ran by the magazine Arts and Architecture. They not only communicated a new language of glass and steel-framed domestic architecture but also the lifestyle that the buildings supported. As the critic Cathleen McGuigan noted “you can practically hear the Sinatra tunes wafting in the air and the ice clinking in the cocktail glasses.”

Exhibition

Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age is organised by Barbican Art Gallery. The exhibition is curated by Alona Pardo and Elias Redstone and designed by the Belgian architecture practice OFFICE KGDVS – architects Kersten Geers and David van Severen. After the Barbican the exhibition will go on show in the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, Stockholm from 20 February to 17 May 2015.

---