U.Porto - Revistas Cientificas
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A Bridge
Get PDFA Bridge continues my research initiated in 2007 when my photography studies at the Palermo University began. On the first project concluded in 2009, shortly after being transferred to Lisbon and beginning to work on the project which I named A Bridge, I faced photography as a window through which to look at the world in search of images that built my idea of landscape. Window or interstice from the Latin Fenestra whose Indo-European root pha(n) means splendour or glow, it’s literally an opening to embrace the light; the same root is found in the word Epiphany whose meaning is divine manifestation
Image-Making After Photoshop: Architecture, Public Space and their Visual Discontents[1]
Get PDFNowadays, I like to refer to “photography of architecture” rather than to “architectural photography”. This is intentional. Within the notion of architectural photography is the sense of a practice of image-making that gravitates exclusively around the field of architecture—thus relating to the stricter aims and legitimation criteria of that discipline and its professional domain. With the broader scope of a “photography of architecture” we may hint at a practice that, while still permeated by architecture-related subject matters, is not dependent on architecture’s specific discourses. Curiously, this approach may have deeper, if less obvious, implications for the culture of architecture and the depiction of public spaces as we have known them until today. From the untold history of architectural photography a profound contradiction emerges: Underlining architecture and urban landscapes as specific topics opposes photography’s progressive flight from a primary emphasis on its topics or themes towards an understanding of it as a self-governing form of art. As I have put it elsewhere, “it goes against the grain of photography’s autonomy to acknowledge that there is a particular practice of photography that is conditioned, or somehow individuated by its focusing on a given subject matter”[2]. If we want to enjoy the critical insights that this foreign discourse can have on architecture, we should overcome this contradiction. Indeed, in addressing how architecture and the representation of public space are impacted by current image-making, we may need to do more than just confront it with the “faithful” mirror of architectural photography.
It is true that beyond the possible relevance of this subfield to the wider history of photography, architecture’s century-long romance with architectural photography has had many concrete outcomes. From Erich Mendelsohn, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe’s early uses of documentary photography and photographic collages, to the delayed recognition of photographers who mostly portrayed buildings as a service to the architectural industry, such as Ezra Stoller and Julius Schulman, architectural photography has a specific yet overreaching history. With growing architectural diffusion through various media, including the internet, the practice has also had the opportunity to amplify its field, find its new heroes, and open up to innumerous practitioners. Through the early adoption of visualization techniques such as photomontage to the proliferating commercial uses of retouched images of just-finished buildings, architectural photography has established its own degrees of autonomy.
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Behavioral mapping of Abu Dhabi’s public spaces: Urban research photography and cultural clashes
Get PDFWhile the study of quotidian practices and daily experiences is now fully appreciated in western urbanism, it is still at an embryonic stage in the emerging new cities of the Middle East. This paper presents an ongoing research project of social-behavioral mapping of Abu Dhabi’s public spaces and its correlation with the existing urban morphology, in an attempt to shed empirical light and update the local public space design guidelines. Photography is one of the observation tools used. However, due to sociocultural conditions, special techniques had to be used. Timelapse, high-contrasted, undirected street photography was key to visualize both formal and informal activities in the realm of the private
About the 4th number of Sophia, Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image
Get PDFIf we take for granted the idea of being in the so-called post-photographic era, the genre that can surely suffer its consequences and show its manifestations is that of architectural photography. Architectural photography no longer documents given that the veracity of what is represented is systematically under suspicion. It is assumed that what is photographed is, at best, an interpretation. Urban photography has lost the fascination it had at the time of the optimistic and utopian configuration of the modern city. Definitely overshadowed that enthusiasm, the exploration of the urban slides towards the transitional territories and the places in transit, where neither the city is a city nor the landscape a landscape. The non-places, the generic city or the third landscape, whatever we may name it, is where the scenery portrays a different ecosystem open to new conceptual and visual narratives that allow us to return to the consolidated city in order to discover something new, hidden behind its prejudices, their stereotypes and their history. In the bland is the substance.
We could argue nowadays that what least interest architectural photography is architecture itself. The built object is not an end but a means: a visual resource to talk about its context and its sociological, political and cultural identity. The more critical and conceptual this approach is, the more artistic it becomes in practice. If the gaze is not innocuous and aseptic then it turns out to be truly personal: the author’s questioning look prevails over the distant gaze of the pure depiction. at’s where the emotion and the critical discourse arise. In the contradiction and chaos, the visual artist finds a new order to explain the notion of what was built and that city in transit, tired of its expansion at the rate of speculation and which seeks to withdraw and redefine itself from within, from its consolidated identity.
Indeed, architecture photography, empowered by its leaning and artistic grounding, is more interesting when we understand it as a projective tool of an interdisciplinary nature. When the gaze at architecture and the urban is cross-sectional and polyhedral it is when it is certainly useful and effective. Photography becomes an instrument of research and analysis.
To understand the complexity of the city and the role architecture plays in it, one must learn how to look at it with a, let’s say, educated and sensible gaze. And we don’t look at it in order to understand it but to transform it. Architectural photography is not an active document but a reactive one; it is the effective instrument of the gaze committed to change. Architecture and the city need to be placed in front of their own visual mirror, in order to feel, listen and recognize each other.
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About the 5th International Conference On the Surface
Get PDFThe 5th International Conference On the Surface: Photography on Architecture - Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image, which took place on the 31st of May 2019 on occasion of MAAT’s Fiction and Fabrication exhibition offered a forum for an interdisciplinary debate on photography and architecture, with a strong editorial component devoted to the publication of original works and ideas at the intersection of these two fields.
Aiming to promote the awareness and reflection upon Architecture and Art, namely documentary photography in regard to its conception as an instrument to question the universes of Architecture, City and Territory, the theme chosen for this edition of On the Surface focused on the contemporary transformations of the public space: “Visual Spaces of Change: unveiling the publicness of urban space”. Proposing to debate and explore the potential of Image and Photography as resourceful tools to research and to reflect upon and render visible the emergence of new collective experiences in the social space, the focus was on Documentary and Artistic Photography for addressing crosscutting issues that are shaping contemporary changes in cosmopolitan territories. This conference wanted in this way to contribute for greater social interaction among artistic and cultural institutions and academia, extending the action of museums, universities and art venues beyond their traditionally circumscribed spaces of action, stimulating the agents and institutions involved to be more active and open to debate in their approaches to public space. The intention was to render visible aspects of urban change, as well as how architectures, places and spaces are used and lived, crossing and shifting traditional boundaries for expanding the capacity of institutions to participate in the public domain. In this sense, we aim to contribute for critically thinking architecture as an integrative field of knowledge with historical, cultural, social, economic and political dimensions, and explore photography as a dynamic process of discovery, documentation and reflection that incorporates interpretive, artistic and even fictional aspects of these multiple dimensions.
On the Surface 2019 challenged authors and researchers from the fields of photography and architecture to discuss and use image and photography to better understand the city as a living organism, a rich multifaceted space characterized by a variety of experiences and programs, which are a reflection of the knowledge, beliefs, values and customs that characterize different societies. Thus, a central objective of the conference was to discuss in what way image and photography can be used to unveil how architecture expresses the cultural values and identity of our cities, being these critical research instruments for understanding and perceiving architecture in meaningful ways, as well as for understanding the past in order to better grasp the transformations that are increasingly influencing our social practices and place experiences, affecting the modes of citizen participation and cultural interaction. By overlapping and crisscrossing the disciplinary boundaries of Image, Art and Architecture, the borders of these disciplinary fields are challenged for critically thinking through contemporary changes occurring in between physical and virtual dimensions of everyday life. Through the realization of these debates, it was intended to contribute to the creation of a space of exploration, discussion and reflection towards new ideas and research paths about the use of photography as an instrument of visual research and communication, as well as about architecture and the public space, with a focus on emerging dynamics of urban transformation.
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Contemporary discourses on Architecture, City and Territory: Visual Spaces of Change
Get PDFOne of the main interests of this panel was to explore the relationships between virtual dimensions of photography and concrete physical realities in contemporary discourses on Architecture, City and Territory. We wanted to discuss, among other things, how constructed and manipulated images that suggest a new reading or create new idealised scenarios of existing architectural and public spaces may be used to cross or infringe certain borders people are bound in their daily lives as a way to act upon reality, fabricating new relationships between individuals and the collective public.
A number of relations between the artistic strategies developed by the authors of this panel could be examined, focusing on the various methods they used for the construction of visual narratives between the virtual world of photography, manipulated visual constructs and the field of architecture in contemporary discourse. In this way, it was possible to discuss and examine today’s possibilities of image creation with digital tools that expand and potentiate significantly the practice of photography on creating imaginary environments of present architecture and public spaces.
In fact, the projects presented went far beyond traditional objective approaches, exploring the fictional universe and making critical readings of existing spaces, going against the undiscerning saturated media consumption of architectural images.
Starting with the text “HC (hortus conclusus)” written by the panel’s keynote speaker Beate Gütschow – an amazing artist who came from the world of realistic painting towards photography medium, having studied with Bernhard Johannes and Wolfgang Tillmans – it can be said that her body of work questions in a very significant way the likeness of photography, being also political and critical towards the notion of truth associated to this media.
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Clareira: Towards a phenomenological perspective in the representation of architectural space
Get PDFThis paper presents the results of a photography based research project on the representation of architectural space. From a phenomenological perspective, the investigation aimed to find a visual approach that would contribute to the representation of architectural space as a place for experience. Trindade subway station, by architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, was chosen as a case study, functioning as a laboratory for the experimentation of visual strategies that emphasize the physical presence and sensorial perception of the photographer, as well as the presences of users
Visually reinventing architecture in the pre-cinematic scenario of Idris Khan’s photographs
Get PDFThis essay analyses a visual reinvention of architecture in media by using Idris Khan’s photographs to show how the expression of a new reality of the Anthropocene changes the experience of architectural space in our collective imagination. From ancient ideas of how to animate form, to attempts by early cinema at decomposing life’s movement, and to the most recent features by groundbreaking digital technologies manipulating visual narratives, the relentless recreation of the world has long been the concern of artistic expression. Could inanimate representations, such as photography, committed to the literal recording of reality as perceived from the eyes of the observer, be considered as a mechanism for animating form
