Building with artificial light: architectural night photography in the inter-war period

Abstract

The interplay of light and shade on architectural volumes has always been a unique source of inspiration to photographers. That this applies as much to artificial as to natural light is shown by the richness of architectural and urban night photography of the 1920s and 1930s. In these decades, photographers such as Bill Brandt, Willy Kessels, Brassaï, Georges Champroux, Roger Schall, Germaine Krull, François Kollar—and many others—captured the nocturnal city and its architecture. This study examines how photographers visualised buildings and cities at night. Despite the night as common denominator, examples of this kind of photographs could hardly be any more divergent. This paper argues that the nocturnal photography of the period cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the impact of the then shifting relationships between light and darkness. Therefore, I propose to study the nocturnal photographs in relation to the processes of cultural change that shaped the vision of the photographer at the time.