Photography and modern architecture. 1925-1939. Andalusia. Margaret Michaelis

Published by the University of Seville, where F. Javier Lopez Rivera works as a teacher, the book focuses on understanding what were the historical moment and the circumstances that approached photography and architecture. Such a powerful symbiosis that it is is virtually impossible today to understand the one without the other.

The book, which summarizes and condenses the extensive research made by the author for his doctoral thesis, it is an opportunity to step back in the understanding of the role photography has played on architecture.

A discovery that remarks photography as the perfect vehicle for the necessary material communication of architecture, and which has been confused however with architecture itself during the last years of visual boom.

 

It is difficult today to understand architecture in full if emancipated from some forms of visual expression, such as photography. Therefore, ne might wonder what was the historical moment and circumstances that enabled both -'old' architecture and 'young' photography-  to begin understanding each other, to collaborate and to almost become indispensable one for the other. The analysis of the historical range selected (1925-1939) helps clarify the origin of relations between these two arts, their existing conflicts, their process of building an analytical gaze media and their diffusion and consumption channels, as well as the importance that the strong growth experienced in photography and publications in those decades had in spreading the values ​​advocated by the architecture of the time.

This book aims to analyze the decisive role played by photography in the construction and development of the image of modern architecture. It's period of study focuses on the time interval starting in 1925, the year in which the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, where László Moholy-Nagy published "Painting, Photography, Film" and in which the revolutionary Leica camera appears. It ends in 1939 with the warlike processes affecting Spain and the entire world, that led to exile and death to a great part of it's main characters, with the subsequent rupture that this meant for the cultural processes initiated.

The work pays special attention to what happened in Andalusia in those years, inquiring about the names of the professionals who worked in these lands showing the stereotypical image of this region that the booming business of postcards transmitted to the rest of the world. It is to highlight among them, for his professional relationship with the GATEPAC, the remarcable figure of the Austrian living in Barcelona Margaret Michaelis and, to a lesser extent, the Madrid-born Luis Lladó, commissioned to document some of the South main modern examples, both anonymous until little over than a decade ago.