Constructing Worlds. The catalogue of the exhibition in the ICO Museum

Constructing Worlds. Photography and Architecture in the Modern Era is a display of the evolution and the style of architectural photography, an issue that the ICO Museum has been developing for years. Through images of Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Julius Shulman, Lucien Hervé, Ed Ruscha, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth, Luigi Ghirri, Helene Binet, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luisa Lambri, Andreas Gursky, Simon Norfolk, Guy Tillim , Bas Princen, Nadav Kander and Iwan Baan we can see how, from the 30s to the present, architectural photography has evolved not only technically but also in aesthetic theoretical approaches, starting with the documentary photography, opposed to Pictorialism, through the conceptual photography up to the moment in which architecture has become an iconographic genre for many artists. In short, both the exhibition and its namesake catalog, are an artistic and sociological journey through the 20th and 21st centuries, a journey through history across 18 very different looks.

The curators of the exhibition and catalog publishers Alona Pardo and Elias Redstone introduce the publication. We leave you a sample:

Architecture has been the most dedicated accomplice of photography since its birth. The long exposure times required by the first cameras made statism and immobility of the buildings, highly valued attributes; architectural works were much more reliable and secure than the human figure models. This symbiosis, born of necessity, has been constant in the history of photography, and photographers -amateurs and professionals- who still want to document this ever-changing world, in an effort to defend and preserve the present of architecture. Constructing Worlds. Photography and Architecture in the Modern Era aims to map this long shared history and it brings together works by eighteen exceptional photographers who, despite having worked in a wide spatial and temporal arc, they share the determination to observe and record the complex environment in which we live. In order to face the work presented in this book, it is essential to understand that architectural photography expresses more or less broad truths about society.

The following photographs go beyond the traditional idea of ​​architectural photography, whose function is to thoroughly describe works of architecture so that it is understood and valued by the largest number of people. The works cover a wide range of proposals, from commissioned architectural photography of Lucien Hervé and Hélène Binet and the conceptual strategies of Ed Ruscha and Bernd and Hilla Becher, to the realistic documentary of Walker Evans and Iwan Baan. Regardless of their aesthetic diversity, each of the artists and photographers poses a challenge to the orthodox architectural photography not only to interpret the intentions of the architect, but by revealing the experience and the symbolic value of the built world. Although the works are presented chronologically, the different themes and interests overlap each other and connect artists and photographers through different generations and geographies. In between architectures photographed there is a dense mesh of aesthetic, personal, social, political and spatial relationships, and the photographies that illustrate them explore the urban and peri-urban areas, the city and the street, the iconic and the ordinary, the military and the authoritarian, the urbanization and the globalization mass.

CREDITS.-

Title.- Constructing Worlds. Photography and Architecture in the Modern Era.
Author.- VV.AA.
Nº of pages.- 279 pages.
Publishing house.- ICO Foundation. La Fábrica.
ISBN.- 9788416248193.