Andreas Gursky:The Copan Building,São Paulo, 2002 ©Sprüth Magers Berlin London/DACS 2014

It might seem odd but the principal medium through which architecture is experienced is photography. The most physical, three-dimensional and visceral of the arts is, for most people who will see it, mediated through the lens and then on to paper or into pixels. Once it might have been through the pages of a magazine or on film but now it is probably through the endless pages of the web with their blue-skied lifestyle images or the Instagrammed sunsets and vintage filters of social media.

Ed Ruscha: Parking Lots: Dodgers Stadium, 1000 Elysian Park Ave, 1967/99,©Courtesy Ed Ruscha and Gagosian Gallery

There is a gulf, however, between architectural photography and the way in which photographers use architecture. The former is a branch of marketing. These are the exquisitely lit minimal interiors, the seductive concrete surfaces with sharp black shadows and dramatic skies. These are pictures of buildings stripped of inhabitants. The latter is the use of architecture to create an image in which the buildings may be the background or the foreground but which tells us something about life beyond architecture. The exhibition opening at the Barbican Art Gallery in London later this month is, more or less, about the latter – architecture in photography rather than architectural photography. Yet it also makes clear that photography has at least as much influence on the way we perceive buildings and cities as the physical locations themselves.....Continue Reading

> via FT