ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the transformative nature of photography and its representation of architecture across a series of technological sites and conceptual frameworks. Photography is described as discipline and techniques that not only records the outcome of the architectural process but is present at all the stages of development from pre-visualisation to afterlife. It represents the physical actuality of the architectural object as a cultural sign – thus facilitating the photographic as part of the process of creation and reflection upon architectural possibilities – and is not simply a means to provide evidence of completion or outcome. Moving on from the idea of ‘reproducing reality’, understood to be the foundation of photographic representation, this chapter suggests that photographic technologies have evolved to the point at which they are capable of being instrumental in constructing new visual realities. These new realities function to enhance, or challenge, the notion of photography’s relation to the ‘real’ and the conceptualisation of architecture itself. The arguments presented here, then, are premised on photography as a transformative interface that allows ideas to flow bi-directionally. This proposition originates in the key modernist discourses surrounding photography in the 1920s that opposed photographic realism with experimental creativity and invention. It is, however, a proposition also considered in relation to digital technologies of photographic origination and post-production. To place this reading of photography in context, however, it is necessary to return to some of its earliest theories.
