I

What would have become of photography without architecture? What, for that matter, architecture without photography? Both are purely fictitious questions, naturally, because the connection was and is amazingly strong. But perhaps they are enlightening, or at least entertaining questions? We’ll see. But first, very slowly, let’s begin at the beginning. 

What quickly becomes apparent is that architecture acted, so to say, as the toddler’s walking frame for photography. The first known photograph in photographic history was created in 1826 on a windowsill. It shows what Nicéphore Niépce saw from the window of his study in the country manor Le Gras, and was taken with an exposure time of around eight hours on a format of 16.5 × 21 centimeters. To achieve this, Niépce used a camera obscura and a coating of light-sensitive asphalt as a chemical substance. He called the technique heliography.

And then? What happened next? The first picture by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype, the charmingly original and non-copyable small metal plate, mostly encased in richly colored velvet, showing a view of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. What we recognize are houses and a street lined by rows of trees. And other than that? Nothing. Wait, yes: a single person with his foot resting on some sort of water-pump and apparently seeming to be taking a rest. The picture appears as if it was taken in the early morning, the streets almost entirely empty. But that would be mistaken. Due to the long exposure time, anything moving failed to engrain itself on the light-sensitive layer, so that qua time and speed were simply overlooked or erased. 

For his part, William Henry Fox Talbot, in his first negative-to-positive process, the calyotype or talbotype (which later, as a principle, dominated photography until digitization), had a penchant for house facades, with a leaning ladder stretching up to the first story, or with a besom in front of an open barn door. Magical stasis, as if it were siesta time. Finally Maxime du Camp, who in 1852 captured the Great Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza on behalf of the French government, unperturbed in themselves and reposing in an architectural garden laid out in time immemorial and forever more, in the garden of the giants. 

Yes, photography and architecture! Architecture and photography! Motionless, sculptural architecture gave the infant pictorial technique a helping hand in taking its first faltering steps. Completely unequivocally. Architectures simply stood there, without whining, without complaining. They were far more concrete than the landscapes disappearing into the horizon, above which the passing clouds would practically rub out the sky in the photographic coating. They allow things to be approached, stepped back from, a frontal or side view, elevations, bird’s-eye views—only for X-ray views it was still a couple of decades too early. Light and shadow were so sharp that the verisimilitude of 3D, of volumes, diffused across the flat negative or positive.   Architecture, building volumes, geometrical brick piles helped photography step-by-step to find its footing. They provided the pretense that everything would turn out right with this new pictorial technique, even if it was a little too slow to begin with, and it still appeared pretty amorphous. 

Otherwise, for quite a while, prospects would have looked rather dim for photography. Perhaps the principle would have even become forgotten, it could be speculated, because other than mistiness, blurriness, and emptiness, to begin with nothing would have remained. What is sure is that it would never have come to the unbelievable act that the French state purchased the principle from Daguerre, granted him a lifelong appanage, and then gifted it to the world: free of charge, non-copyrighted, but also minus any guarantee, just like that, so that it could spread around the world as quickly as possible—in an unsurpassable triumphal procession, as we now know today.

And architecture, what about it? It certainly didn’t have to worry about an existential crisis. A building is a building, and such a great existential necessity—either for habitation, commerce, or manufacturing—that it would have emerged with or without pictorial representation. That’s how easy things are sometimes, at least at the first stage of existence. But then they very quickly became/become considerably more complicated, also in its case. 

It’s absurd, I’ll admit, but I always have the feeling that, in parallel to image creation, architecture in the last 150 to 200 years has become all the more tenuous, thin-skinned, fragile, transparent. The longer the thinner, the thinner the more figurative, the more figurative the more transparent. No thick, solid walls any more, instead glass and steel as construction materials. No squatness, nothing stooped any more, rather an upright gait, and upright stance. Skinny, elongated, thin-skinned, like the demands of fashion, the dictates of capital. Maximum allure, maximum utilization. Nowadays architecture is so much an image that we’re all familiar with it even without ever having seen it. So much an image that it is snatched up at first glance, at the first amount, without ever having even stepped inside it. So persistently and so much an image that it can also have long been torn down again. Didn’t something used to stand here on the corner? Architectural photography, it appears, has jostled its way itself, bit by bit, to usurp the building and the idea of simple use; has swaddled it, lulled it. The current state of affairs can be clearly pinpointed: There is architecture and the image of architecture. Two intoxicating realities, two different ontological modes. Reality 1 and Reality 2. And amazingly we nowadays often read both of them as screens.

II

Back to the beginning again, but askew. What is this actually all about? 

In fact architecture and photography could hardly be further apart from one another. On the one side a real, palpable, tangible, built space which one can look into, walk into, which one can perambulate. We see it, touch it, feel it, and enter it. By entering it, we also occupy it, we are inside it, stretch ourselves out, put it to use, own it, “contaminate” it. Our whole body, our being, reacts to the space, smells the still-fresh concrete, the coating of the parquet; our hands stroke across the surfaces of the still-bare, dewy materials, tear off the rustling protective film; we hear the echo of our steps, the clanging, soft or muffled echo of sounds, of movements. Our bodies, our motions invigorate the architectural mass, they consummate its intention to provide us with shelter and scope. Scope for living, scope for working; space to relax, space to regenerate; school rooms, research, healing, or festive rooms. It is there, stands there, graspable, immoveable, for ages. In today’s world we’d also say: analog, concrete, regardless of whatever digital techniques were used to draw and develop it.

On the other side is photography. Divided, for quite some time now, between analog and digital. Since the first birth pangs of its invention, an almost immaterial “thing,” flat, level, transparent, a glass plate, a film sheet, a film roll, a paper sheet, nowadays a data volume, which unfolds itself colorfully and illuminated from behind on our screens. Photography seems so immaterial that Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Boston physician, lawyer, writer, already wrote, with futuristic extravagance, in 1859: “Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please. We must, perhaps, sacrifice some luxury in the loss of color; but form and light and shade are the great things….”[1] He describes photography not as form and material, rather as pure form—banished onto a negligibly thin medium. In his extravagant fantasy the material world can subsequently be dispensed with. 

Here, therefore, material and form; and there, form minus material. The contradistinction couldn’t be expressed more pointedly: ontologically, architecture and photography are two entirely different planets. And nonetheless they are closely connected to each other; that we know, that we’ve understood earlier here; namely intimately and multiply. Holmes himself writes: “There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed,—representatives of billions of pictures,—since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core.”[2] Unbelievable what the guy had already formulated as early as 1859! Even then—photography was just twenty years old—there were apparently millions of negatives of the Coliseum and the Pantheon as the basis for billions of images, so how many more of them are there today, printed and digital, whizzing around the globe in the age of multimedia, the replica, as Jean Baudrillard formulated it, in the “Simulationsmoderne”, the era of simulation.

Baudrillard understood society as being totally saturated, compounded, determined by media: “Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to media is desocialized or virtually asocial.”[3] And more pithily in the shorthand diction of Michael Wetzel, a Baudrillard connoisseur: “The world becomes the cause of its photographic and cinematic reproduction, and the images from around the whole world supplant the image of the world. One could say: image-being acquires a primacy over being. New medias and computer technologies have catapulted us into this zone of indifference between being and appearance, reality and image. The world of the simulacra absorbs appearance and liquidates the real.”[4] This reads, precisely 130 years later, as radically as if it were a later version of Oliver Wendell Holmes, simply with a slightly more theoretically declension. The images from around the whole world supplant the image of the world, and simultaneously eradicate the real!

Despite their opposing natures, there are obviously relationships between them, including painful ones. On this, once again Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.”[5] Here Holmes describes—avant la lettre—with what unbelievable energy we will smother the world of the real, of material, with a world of images, how we will plaster our planet with images as if we wanted to practically shrink-wrap it in an overlay of pictures, how with time we will also accord depictions more value than the depicted, how the image finally divorces itself from its object and obtains it own unique significance. His comparison with the hunt for skins, with skinning, with flaying the skin off its object, and throwing away the cadaver is a painful affair—physically too.

And to be fair, one of the hunting grounds, one of the trophies of the photographic safari, was architecture. As said, to begin with for the banal reason that architecture is immobile, it stands, doesn’t move, patient and attractive. But then also because the play with built geometry successfully harmonizes with that of seeing, of perspective, with the monocular central perspective of photography. Immobile architecture was and is an attractive didactic drama for photography: captured with alplanatic objective lenses and without converging vertical lines, perfectly mitered, the geometrical volumes compressed into a flat rectangle. With the focus on the vanishing point, with sufficient depth of field and contrast-enhancing filters (nowadays part of the postproduction), that stresses the plasticity of the building, the textured facades, shot from different angles, elevated or from a worm’s-eye view, in order, as required, to lend the architectural volume more standing and vehemence. Architecture helped photography to comprehend the image area and dimensional depth as an interconnected system, as a plaything in photographic composition and form. 

And, once again, now the equation in reverse. As a global rule: 50 percent content, 50 percent communication (or is it 10 or 90 percent?). The project has been planned, building permission granted, and construction is underway. Here photography acts, on the one hand, as a tool of documentation, communication, promotion, vis-à-vis the clients, the authorities, the later occupants, in journals and online platforms; and on the other to try and stay the unstoppable march of time, to thwart forgetting. There’s only one Coliseum, but in reality billions of pictures of it. There are very few buildings that survive for a hundred or hundreds of years, but probably pictures, or at least a few pictures of them. Systems of rates of financial return are ratcheted up all too rapidly nowadays, meaning that architects quite understandably endeavor to have a say in the image of their buildings, to co-define it. Classic architectural photography is their amenable instrument, their assistant, obliged to follow their instructions, freeze-framing the building when the clock hits zero, as soon as the building is complete, cleaned, and the keys are about to be handed over—just before the building becomes occupied and is for the first time transmogrified. Only in this very narrow window of opportunity does the building show what the architects imagine it to represent, what they conceived it to be: as a lucid structure; as a serene, sedate setting; or as a powerful icon, as a piercingly luminous lantern. A moment of rapture before the architecture becomes “utilized,” before—as Roland Barthes once formulated it addressing the subject of trousers, where the trousers only become trousers by being worn—becoming, in other words, actual architecture, a functioning, living, pulsating building. 

For this reason, almost all architectural photography—if it’s not social photography or doesn’t aspire to be art—duplicates architecture in its perfection, in the form of a (as yet) idle reification, devoid of people, devoid of use, as the purest possible visual realization of a particular, personal, perhaps also contemporarily idealized idea. But the control is also so rigid because architects precisely feel, indeed meticulously know, that images speak their own language, that they prompt other discourses than just the physical experience of architecture, because they sense how photography transmutes volumes and structures into planes, distills material and form into pure symbols, into pixels, and how it, in doing so, transforms, accentuates architecture, namely by enlarging, diminishing, deforming, heightening, or lessening it—but in whatever case has the capacity to spread, to scatter it, far and wide. How architecture can coagulate to become a symbol and a mythos. How, at a certain juncture, the image can, as said, have more force than the real architecture.

III

Renderings, in this context, are something like the ultimate control over the image—a kind of photography 4.0. They’re design and idealization rolled into one, an advertizing platform and iconography together. A new form of a self-fulfilling prophecy that in the last resort makes built reality superfluous. At last, Mr. Holmes, here we are! And in its coequal, the field of design is ablaze—the screens are over-glowing! The flip side of the coin is that the designs, precisely because they seem so detailed and consummate, represent an unobtainable gold standard of reality, an eternal springtime. Renderings run the danger of duplicating architecture so radically, so absolutely, that the subsequent built space may seem strangely insipid and anemic. Rendering: crisp and cool. Reality: dreary and susceptible to failure?

IV

The photographic work of Ludovic Balland and his team in this book follow a completely different trajectory. It’s not an Icarus-like flight of fantasy; it’s not dazzlingly gaudy, pompous. Instead it turns back, reverts, and hazards a visual analysis, a visual commentary. It seems to treat the built architecture as one huge resonator, whose vibrations echo in different ways in different photographic materials. The result is a visual conversation that wants to simultaneously mirror the design and reality, idea and material, the built and the used. A bold, ambitious, but, as we ourselves can discern on these pages, auspicious endeavor.

Full stop. 

[1] Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” The Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (June 1859), https://www.the atlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361 (accessed January 5, 2022).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 80.
[4] Michael Wetzel, “Paradoxe Intervention: Jean Baudrillard und Paul Virilio—Zwei Apokalyptiker der neuen Medien,” in Ralf Bohn and Dieter Fuder (eds.), Simulation und Verführung (Munich: Fink, 1994), 139–154. Emphasis added.
[5] Holmes, “Stereoscope” (see fn. 1).