PICTURING THE REAL
Last year I was collaborating on the project of a book about
contemporary architecture in Milan. My task basically
consisted in contacting the architectural firms and asking
them for some material about their projects, such as
written reports and images, that would have been
employed in the publication.
Most of the times the architects used to give me a short
text, a couple of drawings and some renderings and then
they used to tell me that the photographs, material
specifically asked by the editor, weren’t ready yet since at
the time most of the buildings were still under construction.
Nevertheless some of them suggested that I could
anticipate to the editor and the graphic designer that the
photos would have been taken from the same point of view
of the renderings. In other words the forthcoming
photographs would have been nothing but a copy of the
pictures they already gave to me.
this curious mechanism aroused some questions into my
mind:
If the photographs do not seem to constitute any essential
steps further in the representation of the project, since all
they do is duplicating already existing images, and thus
they just increase the “quantity” of the information without
adding any tangible element for the description of the
building, then what is that makes their presence still so
essential in the system of communication of architecture?
Bruno Zevi provides a list of all the tools that we have at
our disposal in order to describe the space: plans, sections,
elevations, models, photographs and cinematography.
According to him, each of them, when taken alone, is
inadequate to describe architecture. The latter indeed,
having more than four dimensions (and the afore
mentioned tools can describe just 2, 3 or maximum 4
dimensions in the case of cinematography), can only be
totally grasped through a direct experience of the space: an
experience implying a certain physical involvement, a
particular awareness and a freedom of movement (in the
sense that virtually a visitor can take infinite paths), all
elements creating in the visitor a kind of empathic
relationship with the artefact.
When this type of direct experience of the space is not
possible the afore mentioned tools, if well employed, can at
least give a sense of it. According to Zevi indeed “each of
them can make an original contribution, but needs the
presence of the others to fill its gaps.”1
1
B. Zevi, Saper vedere l’architettura, Einaudi, Torino, 1948, p.47
(English translation, Architecture as Space. How to look at
Architecture, Horizon Press, New York 1957; Da Capo Press, New
This multiplicity of different media suggested by Zevi is
exactly what we expect to find when we flick through an
architectural magazine or a book in order to get to know
something about a particular project. We need to be
confronted with this corpus of heterogeneous materials
(very different in scale, point of view, syntax, etc.) whose
combination manages to bring about a comprehensive
(although fragmented) narration of the building, of its
different aspects and of the process that took to its
realization. In other words we need a chorus of different
voices, interacting to one another, in order to fill the void
caused by the absence of the artefact itself.
Through these observations we can explain the reason why
the photographs are considered a necessary element for
the description of architecture, but still we don’t get a
satisfactory justification for the privileged position that
photography seems to occupy in respect to other tools. In
other words we still do not know why this medium is by far
the preferred one (or anyway the most employed) for the
representation of a work of architecture.
In the particular situation reported at the beginning of this
essay, we deduce that the presence of the photographs is a
kind of seal of guarantee: in virtue of their presumed
agreement with the very reality of things, the photographs
seem to provide a “more real” and “objective” version of
the renderings that they duplicate: they augment the
credibility of the description.
But if we reflect upon the effects of this mechanism we
realize that the particular way in which the photographs are
used clearly introduces a tautology: an element that turns
out to be a disturbing one and seems to destroy that very
heterogeneity (that set of differences between one medium
and the other) that for Zevi constitutes the precondition for
a striking and effective representation of an architectural
artefact.
What we get in the end is a sort of annihilation of the
physicality of the building: the images do not stand for the
absent object, they just stand for themselves.
In other words when a photograph (that is supposed to be a
sort of subsequent and “objective” form of writing, taking
place when the artefact is built and the design process is
over) perfectly reproduces the drawings, or in this case the
renderings (that instead are supposed to be a kind of
preliminary or intermediate steps of the act of design), the
in-between and the time separating the different phases of
the realization of a building vanish: the constructed artefact
York 1993)
itself becomes a secondary, almost superfluous element. At
the extent that one could even wonder whether it was
effectively built or not.
Lets go back for a while to that which seems to be the label
of photography: the “real”, or the “more real” if it is
compared to other tools. It can be argued that this “real”
lies in the relation2 that photography has with the thing
portrayed: thus with reality itself. this relation is witnessed,
and therefore strengthened, by the extraordinary capability
that this medium has to represent a subject in the most
natural and vivid way. The architectural Photographs, which
are at the same time an index and an icon since they are a
perfect analogon of the artefact (the subject indeed is
normally supposed to be recognisable), the relation
Photography-reality appears to be very close and, to some
extent the closest possible (if we do not count
cinematography). That’s what distinguishes photography
from the other tools and gives it a role of supremacy.
Barthes argues that when looking at a photography
(contrary to other forms of imitation such as painting and
sculpture for example) one cannot deny that the “thing”
portrayed has been there, interfuit. Photography imposes
the existence of its subject, it is a “certificate of presence”.
Or rather of “presence in the past” as Pierce suggests by
saying that the only thing that one can effectively expect to
be real is the very moment in which the referent and the
camera got in touch.
But what happens when, as in the previously mentioned
case (where the photographs resemble the renderings), the
presence of the thing portrayed (the building) becomes a
secondary, almost questionable element? What happens
when we find it difficult, if not rather impossible, to identify
with absolute certainty the indexical track: the referent? On
the one hand we have the building itself, whose existence
became doubtful. On the other hand we have got the
renderings, a medium that in its own definition is a
simulacrum: a copy without the original, a “sign which
dissimulate that there’s nothing”.3 In this case the relation
photography-referent, on which the “real” claimed by
photography is based, seems to vanish, but not for this the
photographs appear “less real”. At this point it becomes
right to ask ourselves what is the possible further essence
of this real, and where it is supposed to be found.
A certain difficulty in recognizing a real photographic
referent is also one of the premises on which T. Demand’s
work is based. He conducts a deep analysis of the mirroring
effect of photography, and through elaborate
metamorphoses of scale, dimension, medium and
materiality, he manages to reveal the very nature of the
photographic medium, which turns out to be fictious and
ghostly.
Demand manages to prove that by the time an image of an
event gets to us we are far downriver from its source,
2
If we consider its etymology of the word real "relating to things"
(esp. property), from O.Fr. reel, from L.L. realis "actual," from L. res
"matter, thing,".
3
J. Baudrilard, Simulacra and simulacrum
whatever it was and, in doing so, he throws into doubt the
traditional role of photography as a faithful transcriber of
the world.
Specifically Demand’s approach centers on “found” images
that relate to scenes of cultural or political relevance, which
have come to our attention through the mass media. The
artist than proceeds to reconstruct the spaces portrayed in
the photographs by means of a cardboard model that he
personally builds in his studio. Than he captures the scene
again, photographically, from a personal angle and in a
personal light.
These photographs are the end product of his work, they
resemble the pre-existing mass-media images, but what
they actually show are the three-dimensional, life-sized
models that Demand builds in his studio. At first sight the
artist’s photographs look perfectly real (in the sense that
they seems to have a “direct relation” to the scene of the
pre-existing images) but, upon careful observation of the
scene represented, one can spot some mysterious and
disturbing connotations, whose revelation, all of a sudden,
destroys the illusion of reality created by Demand’s
pictures and reveals a rather surreal and artificial
atmosphere.
A typical “disturbing connotation” is the lack of details, an
effect that Demand obtains through the use of the
cardboard reconstructions. The models indeed allow the
artist to manipulate and guide the process of perception of
his photos: on the one hand he manages to prevent the
spectator from being “distracted” by the seductive
properties of the photographs (which are its very details).
On the other hand he succeeds in creating a perceptual
short circuit that overturns the spectator’s definition of
reality and causes him to question himself about the nature
of the images: for instance among the original and the one
reconstructed according to fanciful, communicative vision,
which is to be considered the more real? Demand somehow
plays with what Barthes calls the punctum4: a detail whose
perception is not immediate, since it requires a deeper
investigation of the image on the part of the viewer, but if
he manages to find it (its revelation is not granted although
there can be many “punctums” in a single picture. The
capability to find one or many of them depends on the
sensibility and on the culture of the perceiving subject) his
attention is caught, and a kind of empathy (or a feeling of
rejection) with the picture is created. By removing the
details (all the other possible punctums) Demand creates a
sort of “universal punctum” (which is the very lack of
details) that can be perceived by anyone and that causes
the same effect in all the viewers.
4
R. Barthes, in Camera lucida, (p43) describes his approach to a
photography and he says: ”before I scan the photo, I hear what it
has to tell me since the photo speaks” (social condition, historical
time etc) “that is the studium and this goes on until I meet a
punctum: a detail, i.e. a partial object, that has the power to
attract me or distress me, but anyway it has the effect to change
my viewing of the photo”.
What is evident is that a fundamental aspect of demand’s
work lies in the very use that he makes of the model: the
scene that he actually portrays.
Lets focus on this medium: a model usually serves the
purpose of envisaging something that does not yet exist. It
announces a future in which what constitutes only a
potential in the present one day becomes reality. And when
that reality is realized, the model ceases to function and
simply becomes a relic of a non historic process. Demand’s
models exists between images: after the photographs on
which they are based and before the new photograph for
which they are built.
Although the models take far longer to produce than the
photographs that displace them, they begin falling apart as
soon as they are completed and captured photographically.
Their life, due to their fragility lasts just a few seconds, as
opposed to the much longer one of the pictures that
represent them. This relationship between the portrayed
subject and its image seems to give evidence of the curious
effect of “annihilation of the artefact” that we mentioned
before about the photographs of the book I worked for. It
seams to be a peculiarity of the photograph that of leading
to, or pre-announcing, the “destruction” of their referent.
As R. Krauss notices every photography gives rise to the
idea that the original has been copied or doubled.
Therefore when one looks at it, together with its copy,
(although the latter appears as a mere representation) its
singularity and its originality are destroyed. The duplication
projects the original in the field of the difference, of the
multiplicity inside the singular, and so photography
disintegrates its referent.5
From a pure dimensional point of view models are normally
smaller or larger than what they represent, but rarely the
same size. The simulations that Demand builds out of paper
and card deviate from this usual status since they are
characterized by a one-to-one scale.
The fact that the human body can move around in the built
space, creates a temporal short-circuit: in this environment
a visitor (the artist in this case) finds himself literally inside
the idea of space that he remembers (since he saw it in the
pre-existing photographs), but of course his body has got
no record of the physical experience of that environment.
In other words a visitor transposes himself in a time and
place in which he could never be.
Through this process Demand highlights, and literally
materialises, another important feature about the unreality
of the photographic medium: a space-time paradox
concerning its spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority.
The photograph indeed can be considered as an illogical
conjunction between the here-now and the there-then: it
shows us now a place and a situation from the past “giving
us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are
sheltered.”6
5
R. krauss, Theory and History of photography
6
R. Bathes, “The rhethoric of the image”, in Image Music Text,
Published by Fontana Press 1977, london, p 44
Demand’s work of art represents therefore a deep
investigation and an astonishing unmasking of the
unfamiliar world between signifier (the large colour
photograph behind Plexiglas) and signified (the
photographic scene: what we called the referent). He
attacks and deconstructs the presupposition of reality of
what is represented and, as reality recedes, we become
conscious of this world’s actual materiality. The astonishing
truth is that what we took to be office furniture, an
elevator, and so forth, is nothing more than naturalistic
tinted paper and card. As G. Celant notices “Photography,
that indexical record of reality, on which the truth claims of
so much history over the last two centuries depend, has
been revealed to be an accomplice of fraud, a deception, a
lie. The world we took to be real we now know to have been
forged, like the elaborate simulacra of Hollywood sets.
What we thought was the signified (the represented
environment) turns out to be a further signifier, a paper
and cardboard model representing something else in
turn.”7
Celant here calls into question a very important aspect: the
one concerning the apparently indissoluble tie linking truth,
history and photography. Indeed the “invention” of
architectural history, or maybe it would be better to use the
plural form “histories”, is a phenomenon that, increasingly
in the last two centuries8, not only took large advantage of
the photographic evidence (the latter being the power that
a careful association images has to give evidence of a
particular fact or theory), but that cannot even be
conceivable, in the form that we know today, without it. In
respect to this Andrè Maraux observed (1967), p 111 that
“the history of art has been the history of that which can be
photographed, it could even be argued that the history of
art no longer describes and deals with actual works but
with the archives of photographic reproductions. The latter
shape the discourse of a work, divorced from the material
reality of an object”. This last sentence takes us back to the
phenomenon to which we referred before about the images
do not standing anymore for the absent object, but rather
for themselves: as Maraux suggests they stand for the
visual discourse that they bring forward. In regard to this it
is interesting to mention the example of Mies Van der
Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion: it only existed for the duration of
the exhibition, but the photographs of the original structure
have produced so much discourse that the building was
reconstructed for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona,
and can now be experienced once more in material form.
The building has come back from the photographic archive
into built reality.
This use of photography (as the basis on which a discourse
in grounded) in art history (lectures and texts), was
7
Op. cit., p 55
8
To the extent that Reyner Banham in A Concrete Atlantis. U. S.
Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture (MIT Press,
Cambridge, London, 1986, p 18) defines the Modern Movement as
the first movement in the history of art to rely and ground itself
nearly exclusively upon the photographic evidence, rather than on
personal experience and direct survey.
inaugurated by Heinrich Wölfflin. He introduced the idea of
studying this subject through the juxtaposition and
comparison of two photographic reproductions of different
works, belonging to different epochs, but which
nonetheless presented similar motifs, poses or
compositions, for example female nudes by Botticelli and
Lorenzo di Credi, or almost the same interior scenes by
Terborch and by Metsu. The clear correspondence between
the two images allowed Wölfflin to concentrate on the
differences concerning the style of the two works of art. On
this basis Wölfflin could construct and impose a new
method for the classification of art history: one not
anymore grounded on the judgment of value but rather on
the classification of styles and periods.
The one adopted by Wölfflin is clearly a method that
without the contribution of photography, wouldn’t have
been conceivable and surely not as much effective as it
turned out to be. Indeed, despite generational shifts and
cycles in methodology, content, this method continues to
be employed. And one could argue that much of our trust in
the photographic medium comes exactly from there.
Wölfflin indeed used the photographs in order to produce
the recognition and the validation of his theories. The
spectator (in case of a lecture) or the reader (in case of a
book) encounters in the reproductions the visual
experience of perception which Wölfflin theorised. Than it
becomes easier for him to comprehend and to agree with
the author, not only because he visualises what he hears or
reads but also because the proximity of words and images
conveys to the verbal message that objectivity normally
associated to photography. The latter indeed (contrary to
the drawing which by definition is a subjective
interpretation) by virtue of its absolutely analogical nature,
seems to constitute a message without a code 9: a message
which doesn’t interpret (as drawings do) but simply
constitute visual facts that the words are supposed to
clarify. As Barthes notices analysing the relationship text-
image: “the connotation of language is 'innocented'
through the photograph's denotation. It is true that there is
never a real incorporation since the substances of the two
structures (graphic and iconic) are irreducible, but there
are most likely degrees of amalgamation”. 10
A closer scan of Wölfflin’s visual technique clearly shows
that the way in which he uses the images, the way he
chooses, orders and displays them, makes the photographs
everything but a natural and innocent tool. First of all the
choice to arrange two illustrations on opposite pages in the
text makes the dichotomy evident and the formal
differences more noticeable.
Secondly the choice of displaying only black and white
photographs highlights and intensifies the tonal contrast,
and in doing so mirrors and fits into the rhetorical
technique of the contrasting comparison of the styles
adopted by Wölfflin.
9
R. Bathes, “The rhetoric of the image”, in Image Music Text,
Published by Fontana Press 1977, London, p 43
10
R. Bathes, “The rhethoric of the image”, in Image Music Text,
Published by Fontana Press 1977, london, p 43
Analysing the lecturing technique adopted by the historian,
what appears particularly evident is his clear intention to
appear as a mere demonstrator of objective facts. Every
effort that he makes is in order to convey and idea of
naturalness and spontaneity. For instance he used to place
himself in the dark together with his students at their side
and direct his eyes, like theirs, at the picture. In this way he
turned out to be the ideal beholder, so that his words could
distil, and therefore impose, the experiences common to
everyone. Besides his way of speaking never gave the
impression of being a prepared speech, something
completed that was projected onto the art work. Rather it
seemed to be produced in the spot by the picture itself (as
if Wolfflin’s explanation were an expression of his
immediate perception and spontaneous response to the
work shown).
In spite of all this, Wolflin was absolutely aware of the
problems concerning the presentation of photographs, and
of the inadequacy of the latter to render the visual impact
given by the direct experience of three-dimensional
objects, such as architecture and sculpture. Nonetheless, as
he says in a letter to Burckhardt from Rome: “from day to
day I become more convinced that it is absolutely useless
to try to understand monumental art on the basis of what
we can learn from photographs…but today people want to
have only the photographs explained” As to say that the
method had the upper hand of his inventor.
We came to the conclusion that what we call the “real” in
photography cannot be found simply in the referent, the
subject portrayed, and not even in the relation that the
photograph has with it (referring for instance to the
moment in which camera and referent got in touch). This
real seems rather to be the calculated outcome of a precise
set of rules of composition established within a certain
cultural system (social or historical for instance) and the
credibility of the photograph depends on its capability to
follow these rules and produce an image that fits into the
given system. In respect to this, it’s interesting what Pierre
Bourdieu says (in Photography a middle-brow art) about the
social use of photography that he analyses as a faithful
indicator of the taste and the way of seeing of a particular
social class. According to him indeed the objectivity of an
image doesn’t lie in the agreement with the very reality of
things but rather in the conformity with superimposed but
implicit rules (syntax, aesthetics, perspective), which define
the aesthetic canons of a particular social class.
One could therefore argue that the real is nothing but an
effect: an illusion realized at different levels of the
production of the photograph (pose, angle, choice,
technical treatment, framing, lay-out) in which the referent,
thus reality is heavily connoted, although “in no other
treatment does connotation assume so completely the
'objective' mask of denotation.”11
11
R. Bathes, “The rhethoric of the image”, in Image Music Text,
Published by Fontana Press 1977, london, p 43