Interrogating photography as the site of architectural experience: reflections on photography in Der Baumeister

Abstract

Recent scholarship on architectural photography has highlighted the tension and ambiguity in architecture’s relationship with photography and the discrepancy between architecture’s reliance on photography and its common disregard of photographic images as objects in their own right. Further expanding on this re-evaluation, this article examines references and comments on photography from the 1920s and early 30s that appeared in the German architectural magazine Der Baumeister, that suggest their authors were highly attentive towards the photographs they worked with. Their remarks on the expressive qualities of specific photographs included in their articles and photographic depiction of architecture more generally acknowledge the photographs as objects in their own constructive right. Through a close reading of these remarks in conjunction with each other, this article develops the proposition that they reveal a process of negotiating the adequacy of photographs to represent a building and its three-dimensional experience, while signalling a shift in what is understood as an authentic perception and experience of a building. Thus, the article argues for the emergence of a new site of experience that sits in-between of and in tension with both architecture and photography.