Photography is often likened to a visual language. The “most literary of the graphic arts”[i] is after all a formal system with commonly accepted structure and recognizable motifs.
Ezra Stoller, while using the ‘photography as language’ analogy, positioned the architectural photographer between architect and audience, in the role of interpreter and communicator of the architectural idea[ii]. Such an approach invites several questions: how idiosyncratic can that interpretation be, to what degree it depends on the visual language of the photographer and finally whether the particularities of an architectural space invite or prohibit the use of a specific photographic vocabulary. While in the fifty years since Stoller wrote that article, media platforms for Architecture have exploded in number and variety, it remains true that we communicate architecture mainly by image. Yet, instead of witnessing a parallel growth of photographic “dialects”the opposite is the case: increasing homogenization of image, oftentimes driven by the need to present architecture as an easily consumable visual product, expected to survive extremely short attention spans in an environment of information over-saturation. While alternative approaches do exist, they tend to operate at the fringe of commercial architecture photography, employing buildings as a pictorial element in a photographic practice that does not, in principle, concern itself with architectural communication. This kind of photography is seldom, if ever, commissioned by architects and mainly belongs to the world of fine art.
