Image makers of British modernism: Dell & Wainwright at The Architectural Review

Abstract

‘It used to be unkindly said of the modern school of architects before the war that they designed their buildings not to please clients or even themselves, but to please Dell & Wainwright. Unfair though this was, it paid a deserved compliment to Dell &Wainwright, the official photographers of The Architectural Review. It meant that their representations of modern buildings—resplendent in a perpetual mellow sunshine, beautifully composed within a frame of leafy branches or above a foreground dappled with shadows—when reproduced on the glossy pages of the Review came near to the ideal their designers had in their imaginations. They were the brave new world itself …’ This comment, published in the 13th June, 1946, Issue of the Architects’ Journal on the occasion of Mark O. Dell’s retirement, highlights both the expressive power and the influential nature of Dell & Wainwright’s photography. Their images were part of the Review’s 1930s campaign to promote modern architecture in Britain and given much prominence in the periodical’s pages, which had been reshaped by the Editor Hubert de Cronin Hastings and his team thanks to the use of experimental typography and innovative layouts. Many of the trademark features of Dell & Wainwright’s work had been introduced in architectural imagery by the ‘New Photography’, which had originated in continental Europe in the previous decade and encompassed both the ‘New Vision’ of Moholy-Nagy and Rodchenko, and the ‘New Objectivity’ of photographers such as Werner Mantz and Albert Renger-Patzsch. This paper examines the origins of Dell and Wainwright's partnership, their work for The Architectural Review and its critical reception, but also questions some of the most recurrent assumptions related to their photographic output, which was decidedly wider in range than is commonly believed.