ABSTRACT
As long as there have been buildings people have been painting or drawing them. There are fine examples of architecture represented in ancient Egyptian paintings, Roman frescoes, and Chinese scrolls. Researchers in both Asia and the Middle East developed the camera obscura and made discoveries in the field of optics during the Middle Ages. It is in Europe however that the era of modern photography begins. The techniques for chemically fixing a light-based image were developed in France in the nineteenth century. Because modern photography was born within the culture of Western art it followed in its aesthetic traditions. For this reason we can’t talk about architectural photography without also touching on the history of perspective in Western art.
