(Tel Aviv) has devoted herself to the interplay between architecture and landscape for the past thirty years. Through her pioneering work, she has forged a new path in architectural photography where content and context are inverted. Her photography explores how extreme conditions and challenging terrains cause humanity to reorient and re-center itself through architectural responses. Her unconventional photography is based on a working method drawn from her experience in archaeology and fine art photography. Her current research on urban landscapes, historical centers and city peripheries has informed and enhanced her work. In her images, architecture embodies a natural element interconnected with context.” Erieta Attali is a visiting professor at the National University in Singapore and she resides between Paris, NYC and Singapore. She won the German Photo Book Award 19|20 with her photographic monograph „Periphery | Archaeology of Light published by Hatje Cantz. Photo © Nikos Georgopolus
The link between architectural photography and archaeology in my work is rather personal. It has more to do with the experiences that can shape one's aesthetic vision, and less with a conscious underlying theoretical framework. A framework still exists of course, as does a particular mode of looking at structures and surface materiality that stems directly from the skill-set acquired through archaeological research.
Architecture has always been considered a fixed entity in contrast to the ever-shifting appearance of Nature. Photography has dutifully followed this concept of immobility by trying to fix the ‘eternal’ presence of architecture as a memorable icon. In historical terms then, architecture and landscape coexisted in the humanistic continuum of inside and outside space to which Modernism aspired, as "extensions of man", in incidental and uncanny relationships of adjacency and reflectivity. My intention through my photography has been to change this perception.
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.
If “nature” and “architecture” are commonly conceived as opposing entities, representative of human encroachment on the primordially physical image of the world, under which conditions do these two fundamental factors form a strong liaison and which is the ensuing by product? Can this often ignored bond between culture and nature be unearthed and put to light by the use of photography?
The degree to which a building engages with the culture or the landscape of a place is primarily controlled by the design intent i.e. the architectural concept and the success of its implementation. Photography reveals relations but it does not build them in the first place. Even in the extreme case where a structure is consciously designed to differentiate and separate itself from any sort of environment, cultural or natural, it is still inevitably situated into a context and perceived as part of it.
From my very first attempt at photographing architecture in December 1995 I realized that I wanted both building and landscape to narrate a common story and form an inseparable whole. There are two key processes at work when I photograph architecture as a component of its surrounding landscape: one directed inwards and one directed outwards, and they take place simultaneously.