Architecture in Photography

The course offers a reflection on the role of photography as a tool for documenting, promoting and critiquing architecture, and the evolution of its representational systems. It will start from an examination of the early 19th-century photographic campaigns of the Alinari Brothers, aimed at creating a catalogue of the architectural heritage to promote its study and protection. It will continue with an analysis of the production of photographers who specialised in architectural photography (Lucia Moholy, Julius Shulman), and of architect-photographers (Giuseppe Pagano, Erich Mendelsohn), where photography oscillates between illustrative-documentary needs and interpretative readings. Finally, we will deal with protagonists of contemporary photography (Guido Guidi, Hélène Binet, Hiroshi Sugimoto and others), with whom architecture becomes a pretext to investigate in a broader context of research the relationship with the surrounding environment, the potential of abstraction and reflect on temporality.

Particular attention will be devoted to analyzing the play of light and shadow outside and inside the architectural structure, in order to understand how architectural space is visually translated onto the two-dimensional medium of photography.

Predominantly with the focus on analogue photography, we invite to reflect on the use, modes, and different representing media of the architectural object, oscillating between documentation and aestheticization.

In presence

40% lectures, 20% text readings, 40% seminar discussions

Presentation of an in-depth study during the course or at the oral exam ( 50%)  

Oral exam (readings and topics covered in the course ( 50%)