Review: Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age

Abstract

Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, London 25 September 2014–11 January 2015 Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age , curated by Alona Pardo and Elias Redstone, presented a survey of eighteen photographers whose work centers on representations of the built environment. It was a short survey that strove to cover a lot of ground. Most of the photographers are loosely united under a shared desire to record and comment on the social, political, and economic conditions of modernism, as manifested in residential design, the vernacular landscape, and the industrial city. The curatorial selections extended from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century and across the globe, and the images themselves were diverse in scale and composition. The challenge facing an exhibition of this type is perhaps reflective of the growing pains experienced by the field itself. While photography that takes the built environment as its primary subject matter goes back as far as the medium of photography itself, it has been largely neglected as a distinctive field with its own disciplinary history. Robert Elwall’s Building with Light: The International History of Architectural Photography (2004) was a significant text in this regard, a challenge to, in Elwall’s words, “architectural historians [who] too often treat photographs as if they were the buildings themselves and not particular interpretations of them made at particular moments.”1 With the exhibition In Focus: Architecture (2013) at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the “Building with Light” (2014) symposium honoring Elwall at the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a number of monographs on architectural photographers released in the past few years, the subject is receiving broad academic interest. Constructing Worlds was one of the first exhibitions to acknowledge this cultural condition by laying out a select history of the field while striving to maintain curatorial focus. The exhibition began in the 1930s …