Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture

Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture is a comprehensive survey that explores the dynamic relationship between architecture, photography, and the viewer. Seen through the lens of historical and architectural photographers from the 1930s to the present, Image Building offers a nuanced perspective on how photographs affect our understanding of the built environment and our social and personal identities. The exhibition features 57 images that explore the social, psychological, and conceptual implications of architecture through the subjective interpretation of those who captured it.

Image Building brings together works by 19 renowned, under-recognized, and emerging artists ranging from early modern to contemporary architectural photographers. In addition to photographs, Image Building includes ephemera such as magazines and books that illustrate how the meaning of photography shifts when presented in the context of high art or mass culture. 

Organized thematically into Cityscapes, Domestic Spaces, and Public Places,the exhibition examines the relationship between contemporary and historical approaches to photographing buildings in urban, suburban, and rural environments,looking at influences, similarities and differences.By juxtaposing these photographs, Image Building creates a dialogue between the past and present, revealing the ways photography shapes and frames the perception of architecture, and how that perception is transformed over time. 

The photographers represented in Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture are: Berenice Abbott, Robert Adams, Iwan Baan, Lewis Balt, Hélène Binet, James Casebere, Thomas Demand, Luigi Ghirri, Samuel H. Gottscho, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Balthazar Korab, Thomas Ruff, Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, Thomas Struth, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The influential works of all these photographers transformed our vision and concept of architecture.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.