ABSTRACT
Fredric Jameson's essay Spatial Equivalents in the World System includes some of his most powerful passages of architectural criticism in response to a specific architectural object. Jameson identifies in Frank Gerry's own house in Santa Monica a moment of utopian production within the emergent spatial configurations of a genuinely post-modern architecture. Photography fragments architecture into commodity, constitutively disrupting any possibility of grasping the message of the totality of the object. This chapter examines certain kinships between Jameson's interpretative method and the work of the post-structuralist theoretician Louis Marin. Marin associates the iconic city map with the city portrait, explaining that maps were historically categorized as portraits. Most of Hisao Suzuki's photographic reports or portraits will include photographs that incorporate the same two male figures in the fore- or mid-ground of the image. The role of the photographer within the architectural media is that of a specialized technician, the operator of expensive photographic equipment.
