Introduction to Multimedia

Over the last 150 years, the history of architecture has become inconceivable without photography. Through the museum without walls that photographs create, we can experience buildings that we cannot visit because they are far from us or have fallen victim to time. But photography's influence is not always positive; when architects overemphasize a building's appearance in the photographic product, the result can be what Frank Lloyd Wright called “cardboard architecture,” works that look good in print but fall flat when we visit them. Poor photography can flatten good architecture as well, failing to convey its materiality and how users inhabit a space. In the hands of a skilled photographer, however, the photographic lens reveals aspects of the built environment that we might otherwise fail to see. The films reviewed here explore the relationship of architecture and photography, and in the process confront the difficult work of undoing photography's freezing of...