The façade fills the frame: the uses and meanings of the elevational view

Abstract

The camera is set facing a building, whose front is parallel to the picture plane and whose built surface encompasses the visual field: the façade fills the frame. Used since the medium's beginnings, this photographic idiom has become prevalent and distinctive enough to constitute a subgenre. It encompasses work made by a variety of means for a variety of ends, from amateur city snapshots through scrupulous survey work to fine art photography. But perhaps surprisingly, this mode of image-making, in which built fabric is inescapably and pervasively present, does not feature prominently in the standard repertoire of architectural photography. Orthodoxy tends to favour moving out to capture the building in context, moving around to capture three-dimensional form, or moving in to focus on detail. The static elevation view, despite being central to the design and production of architecture, is relatively rare.In seeking to understand this apparent contradiction, this paper explores the strategies and effects of a number of this subgenre's most notable exponents. For Lee Friedlander, the surfaces of buildings provided complex patterns of reflection, shadow and overlap which, when photographed, served to collapse foreground and background onto a dazzlingly complex picture plane. For Todd Webb, in his New York streetscapes and for Ed Ruscha in his Los Angeles work, façades became flatter, more mute, and the camera's gaze concomitantly more dispassionate. More recently, following Andreas Gursky's seminal Montparnasse image (1993), Stephane Couturier, Michael Wolf and others have produced images which establish an equivalence between their heroic scale and quasi-abstract patterning, and the dystopian arrays of high-rise façades they depict.Might it in fact be this multiplicity of possible readings and visual stratagems, in which the built facts constituting the picture's content become a point of departure rather than an end in themselves, which militates against the genre's widespread adoption in architectural photography? Despite, or maybe because of, the fact that in such pictures there is nothing but building, they can seem, ultimately, to be about something else.