Reading the (Photographic) Evidence

Abstract

> There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed.… Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth. > > — Oliver Wendell Holmes , > “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” 1859 Histories of the built environment, like contemporary discourse on architecture, have been populated by photographic images for more than a century, even as photographic technologies have changed radically. For architects and historians, photographs offered seemingly evidentiary representations throughout the analog life of the medium (often dated from 1839 to roughly 1990) despite frequent doctoring of images in the darkroom or on the page. Products of an obsolete technology, photographs are yet fabulous discursive propositions as much as dry records of building. They are revealing diagnostic devices, speaking with more than one tongue to say more than one thing. Reading photographic evidence, then, complicates the architectural historian's task by adding multivalent, nonexclusive, sometimes contradictory visual “texts” to other information about the production and consumption of architecture. Photographs do tell us about the hard stuff of buildings on sites; they also tell us how that stuff is seen at a given moment in time, and how buildings are deployed differently through photographic means—whether in series, sequences, single instances, compilations, or montage. Such photographic assemblages elicit strikingly rich interpretations. In short, photographs are discursive, but in ways that differ profoundly from text or spoken word. We continue to seek analytical frames adequate to what photography historian Matthew Witkovsky refers to as “the game,” in addition to “the match” of this extremely heterogeneous manner of imaging.1 I recently asked Witkovsky whether photographs are like letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, or texts. “All of the above, …