While tracing through Ackerman’s “On The Origin of Architectural Photography,” Pelizzari’s “Traces of India”, Sarraino’s “Framing Icons,” and various articles and websites I felt that I was taken through several layers of acknowledging my conditioned terror. The first of which began with Sarraino, in his depiction of architectural photography without intrinsic value or an identifying aesthetic.
Their purposes are manifold: to describe and catalogue the geometry of a structure; to inform peers of the latest advances in the discipline; to reinforce the professional identity of designers within the larger populalion of experts in the building industry; to set normative benchmarks in the value judgement of a particular scheme; and to establish paradigmatic norms of spatial representation. [127]
I suppose that when involved with a new medium, and before the publicly informal practice of art, the act of photography is in itself is a magnificent occurrence of form. However, when the act of anything becomes oriented towards homogenization [even for purposes of organization] I begin to tense, but rightly so. This homogenization is presented as a form detached from societal circumstance, and the geometry of space offering a chance for class to escape mass in value and taste. This history presents the authoritative gaze of early architectural photography, followed nicely by Pelizzari’s contribution to the role of architecture in the personal imagination. A landscape, an urban center, a building, to know what exists beyond our physical space is more an exercise in imagination more than a reality. With photography, the imagination is provided an image to gaze upon as real and becomes “an agent of experience in other places” [29]. To avoid summary, I’ll continue from here with a focus on the thread of which I’ve identified with.
These articles present visuality, through the lens of architectural photography, in three distinct roles, with a fourth present without recognition. These roles are the overlaying of the authoritative gaze, creating the perspective of which the civilized world becomes recognized, personal inscription, a romantic approach which captures the imposing moment of the space, and authoritative inscription, in which “that representation itself is not a reflection of some ‘reality’ in the world about us, but is a means of casting onto that world a concept – or unconscious sense – of what reality is” [Ackerman, 35]. It is the mass production of the image that casts reality upon the imagination, and this reality in turns kills the imagination. The perfect example for authoritative inscription is Hollywood, a mythic space taken seriously due to the ill visual system funding its existence. Finally, the fourth role that is not present in this model but seems eventual is what I would like to call participatory authority, the decentralization of authority and the inevitable rise of the suppressed lower classes of which such representations are not made for. Examples of this reframing of authority bubble in alternative networks present today such as Instagram [point-and-shoot archiving, geolocation, network sharing] and arguably a movement activity such as critical mass that reterritorializes urban space and allows unusual capacities for outdated architecture.