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At the limits of genre: Architecturalphotography and utopic criticismRobin Wilson aa The Bartlett School of Architecture , University College , London, UKPublished online: 04 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Robin Wilson (2005) At the limits of genre: Architectural photography and utopiccriticism, The Journal of Architecture, 10:3, 265-273, DOI: 10.1080/13602360500162410

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At the limits of genre: architecturalphotography and utopic criticism

Robin Wilson The Bartlett School of Architecture, University

College London, UK

As the title of this paper suggests, my aim here is to

deal with two primary themes: architectural pho-

tography and a methodology of criticism derived

from the study of utopia. My intent is to transfer

aspects of this methodology into the current field

of practice in architectural photography and

suggest the possible implications of this manoeuvre

for thewider field of architectural criticism and repor-

tage. My understanding of the utopian largely draws

on thework of the AmericanMarxist critic and theor-

ist Fredric Jameson, and the French semiotician Louis

Marin. Of particular importance is Marin’s book,

Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces,

first published in the early 1970s, one of the most

exhaustive structural analyses of the original

Utopia, Thomas More’s book of 1516.

I introduce issues of photography into this discus-

sion of writing and architectural criticism because

the documentation of architecture, particularly in

the industry’s journals, is so dominated by the

genre of architectural photography—that is, the

canon of the large format, shift-lensed, filter-aided,

industry-norm image. Photography is the largely

unquestioned, primary medium of architectural

reportage. Textual criticism is often made subordi-

nate to the image, and the hegemony of photogra-

phy can be so complete within certain journals that it

would seem any notion of critical distance between

editorial voice and architectural intent has been

abandoned.

As Robert Elwall has reminded us, critiques of the

present genre style of architectural photography

have accompanied its entire history.1 From the

work of the partnership Dell and Wainwright and

John Havinden in the 1940s, to the photographers

of the View agency today, the imagery of the pro-

fession has been deemed by many to be an

inadequate expression of its referent—of its scale,

its temporality, its sequential logic. It is indeed the

case, however, that of those who have scrutinised

the genre, few have really addressed the properties

of the medium itself. Most would tend to debunk

the validity of the genre as false objectivity and

propose alternatives to architectural photography,

rather than attempt a reform of the perception of

the genre as it stands.

Clearly, the genre ‘regulations’ only work to

exacerbate certain limitations which are inherent

to the medium of photography itself. Helene Binet,

widely recognised as one of architectural photogra-

phy’s leading and more acutely positioned prac-

titioners, stated as much in a text accompanying a

photographic study of Le Corbusier’s La Tourette;

she wrote, ‘In the process of taking photographs

of architecture, I want to move away from the

idea that you can represent architecture with pho-

tography.’2

The issue of the problematic of architectural pho-

tography lies not simply in the specific conventions

of the genre itself, but also in the conventions of

architectural publishing as a whole. A critique of

architectural photography would first need to

address the underlying mechanisms that determine

the status of photography within the industry.

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Although architectural publishing is largely charac-

terised by a substantial over-determination by

visual media, publications fail to acknowledge the

importance of the role of photographic authorship.

The assertion conveyed by editorial convention is

that the onus of interpretation remains securely

with the written word—editorial comment, repor-

tage, interviews, captions and titles. This is a sys-

temic error, also present within the conventions of

journalistic critique. Since when has a building

report explicitly differentiated between the photo-

graph of a building and the absent building itself?

The question of authorship within the image is

never truly addressed. Photography is thus never

fully present as imagery.

Editor, writer and consumer are complicit in the

substitution of ‘image’ for ‘view’. We affirm the

primacy of the central, architectural object whilst

negating the presence and implication of the frame,

the discourse of pictorial composition. We habitually

consume the photographed object passively and not

through the filter of a critical vision. Thus, we, as a

community of consumers, rather than simply being

‘failed’ or ‘duped’ by the inadequacies of photogra-

phy, in fact, complete the process of abstraction

whereby specific architectures, specific places

become merely one more modal expression, one

more facet of the vast, unitary and fetishised com-

modity that is published architecture.

My primary aim here is, then, to provide an entice-

ment to look at architectural photography as image

making. I will suggest a way of understanding the

conventions of architectural photography which

offers both a critical awareness of the implicit rheto-

ric and discourse of the genre image, whilst also

engaging with the genre on more positive terms.

My proposition for reform—not, it must be remem-

bered, of architectural photography, but of our per-

ception of it—is based in the second of my themes:

the utopian. This I will later discuss in relation to the

work of Hisao Suzuki, the in-house photographer

for the Spanish journal El Croquis (Fig. 1). First,

though, some introduction to my understanding of

the utopian, and why it seems to me a fitting

condition through which to examine architectural

photography in the first place.

The most common translation of the word u-topia

is no-place, or without place. The literary genre,

from More’s Utopia, to the utopias of the industrial

age, to science-fiction, performs, as one of its recur-

rent traits, the description of a place that it also dis-

locates from historical time and geographic space.

Indeed, it is Louis Marin’s understanding of utopia

that it can only be accessed within the pages of

the book itself, that its worth is only to be found

through an examination of its textual practice and

not as the blueprint for actual social change, either

in whole or in part.

Architectural photography has long been domi-

nated by a tendency to depict the architectural

object only in its finished state, free of the signs of

process or occupation. Convention has it that a

photographer will document, or even reconstruct,

that briefest of moments in the building’s evolution,

between the departure of the construction workers

and the arrival of its occupants. Architecture is

depicted as if dislocated from the temporal pressures

of its context. For, repeatedly to depict architecture

in its pristine state is to construct an object that

is environmentally, economically and socially

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Figure 1. Hisao Suzuki,

DZ Bank by Frank

O. Gehry, 2004, Berlin,

courtesy of Hisao

Suzuki.

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dissociated, beyond the material processes of the

everyday and beyond conflicting discourse. Thus, I

would suggest that architecture is removed to a

kind of no-place by the frame of the camera, by

the artifice of photography—removed to the pages

of the journal in, what one might call, an utopian

state of separation.

Now, this effect of utopian separation of the

object from its context is precisely the reason why

architectural photography has been challenged

and criticised since the 1940s. But what if one

were to begin to differentiate photographers who

uncritically replicate the formulae of the genre

from those who are mindful of this inherent con-

dition or problematic, regardless of whether they

call it utopian or not? What would be the criteria

with which to distinguish an active utopian vision

from one which is simply a mannered repetition of

established formulae? Can, in other words, this sem-

blance of an utopian trait in architectural photogra-

phy have an utopian purpose proper unto itself?

For a definition of utopia’s purpose, I turn to the

work of Fredric Jameson. According to Jameson,

the question of utopia resides, in essence, in our

very ability to imagine our collective future, our

capacity or willingness positively to affect the

course of social change. He has defined the

utopian as the opposite to ‘replication’. Utopia pro-

poses, in other words, revolution, ‘the attempt to

establish the elements of a [. . .] space radically differ-

ent from the one in which we reside’, as opposed to

the perpetuation of the ‘existing logic’ of a given

society.3

One of the characteristic traits of Jameson’s work

has been his insistence on the continued value of the

notion of utopian anticipation, beyond the revolu-

tionary 1960s and into a world securely within the

grip of ‘late capitalism’, and of postmodernism’s

supposed refutation of notions of utopia and inno-

vation. The reason that for Jameson the utopian

still signifies resistance and the possibility of radical

difference is to be found, at least for the time

being, in the failures of utopian representation, in

what he terms its ‘structural inconsistencies’:

the utopian text really does hold out for us the

vivid lesson of what we cannot imagine: only it

does so not by imagining it concretely but rather

by way of the holes in the text that are our

own incapacity to see beyond the epoch and its

ideological closures.4

What is important about utopia for Jameson, is

not so much the form of the utopian scheme (the

ideal city, etc.) that the imagination of a writer pro-

duces, but rather the way in which that act of

imagination is structured into language, into a

text, into narrative and description. The prospect

of instigating difference or social transformation

through praxis is taken by many to be a falsehood,

negated by the fact that one cannot transform the

current system from within; as Jameson puts it,

‘the real future, if it is radically different from this

present will, by definition, scarcely resemble the fan-

tasies of the present’.5 But we can, according to

Jameson, gain a kind of abstracted insight about

the future from utopian works. We can discern

glimpses of the direction of a possible next move

in the system’s evolution by examining how the

writer unwittingly, or unconsciously, leaves traces

of their own, of society’s, of the current system’s

conceptual and ideological limitations.

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Put very briefly: the form and style of storytelling

used to present utopia, also covers or hides what

we cannot imagine, it conceals within itself, the

incapacity to break through our conditioning by

the current system. The interpreter of the utopian

work must therefore look to these blind spots or

‘holes in the text’.6

This may be all very well, you might say, for literary

works—for books named Utopia, News From

Nowhere, Brave New World—but how can we

begin to confirm that architectural photography

might be harbouring a similar vocation, let alone

an unconscious capacity to imagine the future of

architecture?7 Even though architectural photo-

graphy transfers its object to a kind of utopian con-

dition of separation, how can we be sure that this

has any of the intent of utopianism behind it?

The photography of Hisao Suzuki presents an

intriguing starting point in this respect because of

a very particular point of similarity between his

work and the Utopia of Thomas More. The above

descriptions of utopian works have defined them

as confrontations with conceptual and ideological

limits, the attempt to represent that which we

cannot imagine. Utopia is the product of a mind

grappling with its own powers of imagining, of a

conceptual effort which treads, as Marin puts it,

‘the border between sensibility and understand-

ing’.8 There are incidents within the narrative struc-

ture of More’s Utopia which amount to a rhetorical

acknowledgement of this inherent confrontation

with limits. One of them is the moment at which

the author himself becomes a character in the

book, entering its pages to meet Raphael Hythlo-

daeus, the fictional character who travelled to

Utopia and returned. More and Raphael meet and

converse on a turf bench in a garden of an hotel in

Antwerp. This is the culmination of a series of

devices and narrative events that Marin refers to as

Utopia’s ‘literary effect of reality’, whereby More

claims to have transcribed the account of Utopia,

not authored it.9 Deliberately moments of contradic-

tion are constructed, intentional breaks in logic in

the distinction of fact from fiction, narrator’s voice

from narrated object. The problematic of Utopia’ s

underlying mechanisms of production puncture the

surface of representation, and impossible points of

contact occur between the two worlds.

Like many pages of the journal El Croquis, page

119 of edition 117 is purely pictorial: it has no

text, it has no margin even, it is exclusively photo-

graphic (see figure 1).10 A single image covers the

page, showing the interior of Frank Gehry’s DZ

Bank building. We see on the left a figure, set

deep in the image, the rigidity of his pose in stark

contrast to the plasticity of the building’s inner con-

ference chamber. The figure is, in fact, no incidental

presence, it is none other than the editor of

El Croquis, Fernando Marquez.

Close scrutiny of the photography in El Croquis

reveals that, within a building study, it is not uncom-

mon for Marquez and his co-editor Richard Levine to

appear. Sometimes they appear individually, some-

times together and sometimes they are

accompanied by the building’s architects. This has

occasionally comprised an unabashed portrait

scene, with actors composed in foreground space,

such as in an image of the interior of the chapel of

Valleceron (Fig. 2).11 It shows Marquez (his gaze

concealed by sun glasses), Levine, on the right of

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the image with his back to the camera, the archi-

tects (Madridejos and Osinaga), two younger

figures in mid-picture and, immediately exterior to

the building, a dog. With these figures, Suzuki

constructs a casual, discursive configuration within

the geometry of the chapel, staging a pictorial dialo-

gue both with architectural space and with the

mechanisms of the media which construct its

representation.

Suzuki’s portraiture usually takes the form of a

more discrete presence, disguised within a see-

mingly incidental event of the fore to mid-ground,

in which a combination of these various authors of

the published scene will appear as mere anonymous

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At the limits of genre:

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Figure 2. Hisao Suzuki,

Chapel of Valleceron by

Madridjedos and

Osinaga, 2001,

Valleceron, Spain,

courtesy of Hisao

Suzuki.

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loiterers, such as in a documentation of the interior

of Jean Nouvel’s Palais de Justice in Nantes.12 The

device also undergoes various other strategic,

spatial evolutions. At the restaurant of Les Cols by

RCR architects, we see that Marquez, seated directly

opposite the camera, is within the building whilst

the camera records from the exterior.13 At the

stadium of Lasesarre by No.Mad we can just make

out the figure of Marquez, this time conversing

with another figure outside a closed gate, whilst

Suzuki records the scene from the pitch within.14

As Suzuki explains, the editors often travel with

him on a shoot and their presence in the image has

gradually become a constant within the range of pic-

torial devices he has developed, helping to fix a sense

of accurate scale and perspective.15 However, the

frequency with which the two are included, and

the ingenuity of their deployment within architec-

tural space, suggests a deeper motivation behind

the portraiture. The device has evolved into a game

of appearance and absence, constants and variables,

recognition and anonymity, through which the

mechanisms of the production of architectural pub-

lishing are presented symbolically within the image.

Once recognised for who they are, these actors of

the building study would seem to indicate a complex

game of self-reflexivity in Suzuki’s work. In evolving

this relationship between the position of the camera

and the position of editors within the building,

Suzuki makes an unequivocal statement concerning

the importance of his own authorial role in the con-

struction of the scene. He also indicates a wider

awareness of the kind of problematic within archi-

tectural photography that I have categorised as

utopian. For, in picturing editors and architects as

anonymous actors, one might suggest that Suzuki

underlines the symbiotic nature of the image of

architectural publishing: its inherent combination

of multiple authorial positions, photographer,

editor and architect; the degree of reciprocity

between the frame of the camera apparatus, the

format of publication and the tectonics of architec-

ture. Thus, by the same token, the portraits could

also be understood to posit a reminder of the

limits of photographic representation, that it

creates, by definition, an incomplete view, and a

constructed image.

Suzuki, it must be said, is privileged amongst

photographers. Since 1992 he has been responsible

for all of the commissioned photography appearing

in El Croquis. There are also other factors which set

El Croquis apart frommost other journals. It provides

overviews of the work of architectural practices, and

editions often comprise a monograph on one par-

ticular architect. Thus, El Croquis surveys the com-

plete or recent works of an architect at the given

moment of publication, showing buildings in many

phases of evolution: as projects on paper, as

models, in the process of being constructed and

inhabited/appropriated by the user. Therefore,

Suzuki documents a range of different moments in

the life of buildings, including the latter phases of

the building site.

Onemight consult El Croquis on a regular basis and

never be awareof anymajor differences in the style of

photographic documentation, for Suzuki fundamen-

tally upholds the formulaic norms of the canon. The

editorial format of El Croquis might emphasise

process and the transference from drawing to built

form. But does Suzuki use his position to work

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towards the development of a photographic equival-

ent to that approach? Does he explicitly work against

the illusory separation of architecture from the sur-

rounding forces of its context? The answer is, of

course, only in a very partial sense.

My understanding of Suzuki is that rather than

seeking to move architectural photography away

from its utopian tendencies, he, in fact, activates a

genuine utopian function.

Marin describes Utopia’ s effect of reality—such as

the meeting between More and his fictional charac-

ter Raphael—as a mechanism which indicates ‘that

we are changing worlds, that we are leaving a dis-

course that speaks of the world and entering the

world of discourse itself’.16 It marks a passage

from ‘referential discourse’ to ‘discourse that is its

own object’, exclusive to the textual space of

Utopia.17 More’s appearance ultimately signals,

therefore, the fact that Utopia cannot be realised,

that it is no-place, and possible only as discourse

within the pages of the book; as Marin writes, ‘we

have forever entered into words and signs, never

to emerge again’.18

In Suzuki’s photographs similar devices—the inci-

dents of portraiture—indicate, as I have suggested,

his awareness of the utopian-type traits of architec-

tural photography. But his intent is certainly not to

eliminate those traits. On the contrary, I suggest he

indicates an intent to accentuate the existing and

inherent qualities of the genre. Suzuki’s portrait

device amounts to something more like a game

whereby we are made mindful of the error of

viewing the photograph as a transparent document,

only then to enter more fully into the grip of the

photographer’s construction of reality. Rather than

seeking to eradicate the problematic between pho-

tography and architecture, he foregrounds it.

Suzuki’s portraiture ultimately accompanies his cele-

bration of the photographic art, the luxuriant qual-

ities of the image, the optical pleasures of the

profession and, above all, photography’s capacity

to edit and dramatise reality. The portraits signal

that we are entering into a pictorial discourse on

architecture that indeed, exists nowhere, except

within the pages of the journal.

When I suggest that Suzuki reforms architectural

photography towards an activation of its utopian

function, I make the claim, therefore, that his work

actively differentiates between the formulaic image

of the newly completed building, and the search

for an essential image of the new, to present a con-

frontation with an authentic margin of difference in

the built environment. His practice has, as its voca-

tion, not simply the creation of architecture’s photo-

graphic likeness, but that it should participate in

architecture’s debate on the capacity for transform-

ations in the system. As a photographer, Suzuki

enters and documents the sites of advanced archi-

tectural practice, and in that slice of time when he

documents he is not present as one in a community

of users to an architecture, but is the specialised

witness to its hopes and to its pristine intent.

This is essentially where I intend to leave my com-

ments on Suzuki for now. Only, I will reiterate, by

way of conclusion, Fredric Jameson’s insistence

on the importance of the failures of the utopian

genre. For, although we cannot presume to imagine

the future concretely, we can, following the example

of Louis Marin, look to the structural inconsistencies

of the utopian work, to its ‘incongruous elements’

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and ‘topics of rupture’, which are its attempt to

disguise the limits of our capacity to imagine the

future.19

The implication for an utopian function within

architectural photography is by no means negative.

As Marin insists, through the analysis of the totality

of utopian works a critical discourse can be revealed

and glimpses beyond the ideological structures of

the present afforded. To understand the imagery

of architectural photography through a similar

logic would be to suggest that the supposed failings

of the genre as regards the contextual reality of the

architectural object could be defined as a generative

margin of difference between real and represen-

tation, capable of revealing architecture’s own con-

ceptual inconsistencies and blind spots. This would

suggest that critics of architecture could profitably

engage in the excavation of the current, as well as

the historical, imagery of architecture, to study the

internal dynamics of photographic composition

itself. The presence of an utopian function would

imply that within the imagery of the architectural

profession both critique and anticipation occur. Pho-

tography, I suggest, is the medium of architecture’s

hidden or latent discourse and the archive of its

emergent future.

Notes and references1. Robert Elwall, ‘The Specialist Eye’, in Sitework: Archi-

tectural Photography Since Early Modernism (London,

The Photographers’ Gallery, 1991).

2. Helene Binet, ‘Photographing Shadows at La Tourette’,

in The Secret of the Shadow. Light and Shadow in

Architecture (Frankfurt, Deutsches Architektur

Museum, 2002), p. 104.

3. Fredric Jameson, ‘Is Space Political?’ in Cynthia

C. Davidson, (ed.), Anyplace (Cambridge, The MIT

Press, 1995), pp. 192–205, p. 196.

4. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York, Colum-

bia University Press, 1994), p. 75.

5. Jameson, ‘Is Space Political?’, op. cit., p. 197.

6. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, op. cit., p. 75.

7. These titles are of utopian works by Thomas More

(1516), William Morris (1890) and Aldous Huxley

(1932) respectively.

8. Louis Marin, ‘The Frontiers of Utopia’, in Krishan

Kumar and Stephen Bann, (eds.), Utopias and the Mil-

lennium (London, Reaktion Books, 1993), pp. 7–16,

p. 12.

9. Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual

Spaces (New York, Humanity Books, 1990), p. 72.

10. El Croquis, 117 (Madrid, 2004), p. 119.

11. El Croquis, 106/107 (Madrid, 2001), pp. 206–7.

12. El Croquis, 112/113 (Madrid, 2002), pp. 58–9 and 65.

13. El Croquis, 115/116 (Madrid, 2003), p. 102.

14. El Croquis, 118 (Madrid, 2003), p. 43.

15. Correspondence from Hisao Suzuki to the author

(31 March, 2005).

16. Louis Marin, ‘Utopian Discourse and Narrative of

Origins from More’s Utopia to Cassiodorus-Jordanes’s

Scandza’, On Representation (Stanford, California,

Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 94.

17. Ibid., p. 94.

18. Marin, Utopics, op. cit., p. 72.

19. Ibid., p. 197.

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