Architectural Photography

Author(s): Cervin Robinson

Source: JAE, Vol. 29, No. 2, Describing Places (Nov., 1975), pp. 10-15
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture,
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 ARCHITECTURALPHOTOGRAPHY
Complaintsabout the
Standard Product
A feeling of dissatisfaction with the way
new architecture is seen in professional
photographs has existed and probably
grown for what must by now be some
decades. This feeling, persistent but mild
and largely unfocused,is directedspecifically
at the way new buildings appear in the
magazines and books that are the principal
vehicle for architecturalphotography.There
is a discrepancybetween the image and the
reality. It's not a question of lack of skill on
the part of photographers;on the contrary,
it's more a questionof skill seemingly misap-
plied-though no one thinks there's any-
thing intentionally sinister afoot.
Three particular points of objection that
might be raised to the photographs are
these:
1) A point of view cannot be distinguished
as the photographer'sas distinct from the
architect's. The photographer is always
the architect'shandmaiden,to the point
where magazinesdo not hesitate to share
the photographer'sbill with the architect
(though they would hardly share their
critic's with him). Professional architec-
turalphotographersdo not even have the
saving grace, if it be that, of the fashion
photographer'sirony.
2) Even when he is not a spokesman for the
architect, the photographer tends to
show, the disgruntledfeel, only what will
make his photographs attractive-that is
to say, only a fractionof what constitutes
a total building;thereafter,the magazine
writer, in using the pictures,is limited in
making points to those that the photo-
graphs support.
3. Finally (and for this photographer is not
held responsible, since he is assumed to
have no choice of subjects, but to be
essentially a hired gun), what is illus-
trated in architecturalmagazines is seen
as not representative of all the kinds of
architecturewhich are being done well,
but as limited to a very narrowspectrum
of the buildings whose appearance (in
photographs) the editors of a magazine
have a taste for.
It is true that the professional architectural
photograph is a remarkablystylized thing.
Not only does it really speak only for a
particularinstant of time andof one particu-
lar, sharply framedview, but it is unlikely to
have been taken under "typical,"averageor
even the prevailing light at a time of day
when, say, the side of the building shown is
most likely to be seen in dailypractice.What
was behind the cameraor even just outside
10 the frame of the picturewill only sometimes
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7p
be hinted at. The picturewas probablytaken
with a lens which would have distorted the
forms and spaces shown. (The precise form
of this distortion is open to more than one r- --.4V ?
-q I'
interpretation;the question of how to inter-
pret it is one properly dealt with, not here,
but in my forthcoming article, "JimmyDu- SANDY WILLIAMS%
SISTERS
rante's Nose and the Scala Regia of the r-,•LENHOH
Vatican".) wusni
.
o...
Typically the architectural photograph is
taken in brilliant sunshine on a rare, deep-
blue-skiedday. Interiors have been tidied as
they may rarely be in reality; furniture has
been carefully aligned. The picture is un-
likely though perhaps more likely now than
twenty years ago to show much of the
neighborhoodof a building.There is a good IWO
possibility it may include no people.
I- ?
;
If askedto explain why he photographs as he
does, the architecturalphotographer could
justify most of it in the name of clarity.The
wide-angle lens he uses helps distinguish i
planes in his picture; it tends to play down :,"
distractingsurroundings;and,when his back
is-up against a wall, it allows him to show
more. Furniture that is out of line will be
more distractinglyapparentin a picturethan
in reality;people who are asked to hold still
for a photograph are likely to appear dis- iF '\tb
~
""
-
tressingly unnatural.The building which is
his main subjectmay standout clearlyonly if
neighboring structures do not appear with
\~~ .,
. ..=
equal prominence and clarity.
The light he uses reveals and distinguishes
forms and surfaces as light from another T'he Professional Standard
direction or as diffuse light from an over-
cast sky could not. Where several picturesof
one building are taken, each under a differ-
ent sky, the varying lighting conditions can
distract;and a building photographedunder
overcast skies may not be fairlydealt with if
it and another taken in brilliant sunshine
are juxtaposed.What is supposed to appear m aloEo
"iWl nnl]]lllli
?
with clarity are buildings, not the particular -
circumstances under which they happened
to be taken.
!
;:;lllil,!
i •
There is an alternative mode of architectu-
ral photographyused by editors taking their
own photographs which is intended to be
merely (or especially) objective. These pic-
tures are made under whatever skies prevail
and often show buildings in light which is
most unflattering.
Such light, ratherthan distinguishing surfa-
ces one from another, emphasizes streaki-
ness and blemishes. Differences in tone of
material that are of secondary importance
are emphasized. Overcast light is the light Cervin Robinson is Americanrepresentativefor
of hostile criticism (consciously or uncons- The ArchitecturalReview. He was a Guggen-
heim Fellow in photography in 1971-72 and has
ciously). In the hands of editors who simply just co-authoredSkyscraperStyle: Art Deco
assume that what they see at the time they New York (New York:Oxford University Press,
take a picture will be shown articulatelyby 1975) with Rosemarie Haag Bletter. He is now
the finished photograph-a common as- completing a book on architecturalphotog-
sumption in practice-such pictures are raphy and its techniques to be published by
merely slovenly. In the hands of the British Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross.
 of "Outrage" in the 1950s,' such
editor,
hostile light became an effective weapon.
But, even used well, the "objective"editor's
is as stylized aitsthe professional
reode quite
photographer'smore o()ptimisticview.
=!1..
Several Suggested Cures
But the point, o)f course, is as much that of
shoiwing buildings as of facilitating articu-
late photography. Photographs are used I--
because, and only so long as, they seem to . )-
do a better job than do alternative ways ()of
presenting architecture.It is therefore more
than reasonable occasionally to consider
how w-ell photography is really doing the
.. .
job. .-...
.
,• •

The critic James Marston Fitch has made

some especially interesting remarks about
architectural photography, principally in :
two book reviews, moneof Paul Heyer,
Architects on Architecture,' the other of "•" ?" '
"
- "
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and ?'
;_: ;
.•
.:

Stephen Izen(ur. Learning from La.r Ve- L,. ..??

gas..i In the first he describedthe unsatisfac-
tory characterof architecturalphotographs
("It is always June for these buildings.
Moreover it is alwvaysdaytime,"etc). In the
second he suggested several alternative
routes that architectural photography
7I ircIc1, of arc(hitectural A erica(/acin
might taken in irder to improve its perfor- and inidd/c>. of 1968 ,
page. top one bh
mance. These were substantiallythree: Peter Schmidt enturi & Rauch.the
Vl
1) Instead ()f o)nly)the one set cof visual other of 1935 by Walker Evans. The
f.ir
perceptions fro)ma single vantage point Mlodernu'orld.:Ezra Stoller 1958 (facing
i. Re Co
that a present-dayphotograph provides, page. bottom SO,\VY .vletals
buiidinL at tRichmond, ynold'.
the recording should include all of the I'ir:inia.
sensations that enter into one's response Architect and riter G E Kidder Smith
to a building-motion, temperature,hu- (hbove. (iovanni GreppiI at
midity, so)undand so forth. Redipag/iL. froem IVtalyBuidis of 195.5 non
,f Sacr,1,riam
out print. Normlan McGrath
2) Alternatively, if the record must indeed hb.nsurdl
1967-./7lt) o. and
confine itself to the visual, it could be ,Ric/.ard lattncr'Y Dai-i.r
Brotd". l.rtce Lauder plant. Cervin
made a sort of databank, ie, the pictorial Robinson 1966 (bottom), I .11
recordwMuldhave the usefulcharacterof 1 "nive,'sity IPlaz,. Pe.r,
completeness and o)bjectivityof a set ()f
vertical aerial photographs.

3) Failing both these possibilities, Fitch

suggests a last desperate alternative:the
architectural pho)tographer could go
about his work honestly and responsibly,
for a change, and show the bad news as
well as the goo)d.
Fitch's criticisms grow from his long-held
view that architectureis more than simply a
visual, aesthetic matter: that emphasis on
the visual has distorted its perforrmanceand
made buildings w~orsethan need have
the)"
been. So his remarks on photography are
made only by-the-way. Theyvare, neverthe-
less, of g,'eater interest than one might
suppose, since each represents a long-
standing puzzlement over photography on
the part of its audience.
His first prescription would call, say, for
color, sound and motion. Manyarchitectural
historians have felt that commercialmotion
pictures have communicated a
sense o)n occasioin
place the usual slides in a
o•f as
classroorm coiuldnever have done. A scene
from the Antonioni film Blow-up is an
example frequently offered. While the tell-
ing objections to the use of motion pictures
foir illustrating architecture in classrooms
are that they are too expensive to make and
that what each film can show would be too
particular to suit any number of teachers or
the same teacher much nmorethan once, one
suspects also that the Antonioni effect
co(nes as much from nan idiosyncratic use of
sound as it does from sensory completeness.
Perhaps the sound of wind or of a buzzing
fly could galvanize any relativity static shot
and induce a sense of place.
The search for sensory completeness is
clearly what has long encouraged the devel-
opment of three-dimensional photography,
of color processes, of the motion picture
and of the sound that goes with it. But in
general, new sensory dimensions that have
been added to photography have tended
only to spawn new art forms and technolo-
gies-each form as fully abstract as the
simple black-and-white print. Motion pic-
tures are used primarily for fiction. Color in 11

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 books and magazines is used to achieve
richness and desirability in the publication
rather than accuracy in the rendering.
Three-dimensional photography has found
its fullest use in aerial photogrammetry,ie,
in mapping.
Even where color motion pictures have
been used specifically to describe architec-
ture, the perspective tends not to confine
itself to that of any actual viewer of the
building but to be that of a distractingly
restless camera or, as in the work of Lamo-
risse, the exotic perspective of a very special
helicopter flight. It has been the teasing
passage between what might just have been
the pedestrian'sperspective and what could
only have been the flier's that have been the
most successful in Lamorisse'swork.
Fitch's second alternative,that architectural
photographs be repositories of data, would
require their being drained of pictorial
impact.The sort of thought that lies behind
this use of photographs is suggested by the
following statement, quoted in Melville
Branch'sCity Planning and Aerial Informa-
tion: "[Amrom] Katz has calculatedthat a
[9 x 9 inch] photograph provides ... a-
bout 81 million bits of information.., if
the photograph has resolution as low as 10
line pairs/mm based on 15 definable gray-
scale values."15
This sort of calculationdelights those who
want photography and its users to put on as
technological a guise as possible. Fitch
indulges in something of the sort in his
review of Learningfrom Las Vegas: "Con-
sider the following proposition: any build-
ing stands on a plane of 360* in circumfer-
ence and under a hemisphere of 180*.
Assume that it can be photographed only
from points one degree apart (an absurdity,
of course: there are an infinity of points
within each degree). This would mean that
the photographer must choose a single
vantage point from among 64,800 positions
in space ..." and so forth.
The rhetorical content of such an exercise
in calculation will be apparent if we note
that Fitch arrives at his figure by multiply-
ing the arcs from horizon to horizon 360
times, thus counting each crossing of longi-
tude with latitude twice with the exception
of that at the zenith, which is given special
emphasis (it is, after all, the viewpoint of
the vertical aerial photograph) by being
counted 360 times. Assuming that one-
degree separations between views are satis-
factory at the horizon, a figure of 20,600
might be more realistic. An actual applica-
tion of photography which Fitch's argu-
ment calls to mind is stereogrammetry as
applied to the preparation of architectural
measureddrawings.PerryE Borchersof the
State University of Ohio, who practices the
technique, suggests that the smallest useful
angular separation between viewpoints is
closer to three degrees.6 So the 20,600
might well be divided by 32. Or, arguing
that the eyes can unite stereo pairs taken
12 almost 150 apart, perhaps one need take
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only 92 photographs to cover the hemi-
sphere, or a mere twenty-four to show what
the pedestrian could recognize as from his
viewpoint. Fitch's calculation is rather like
our determining the total number of state-
ments that could be made about Learning
from Las Vegas or its subject matter and
then taking him to task for making the few
he did, which after all filled only one
magazine page.
Rhetoric aside, Fitch is simply concerned to
find in photographs what he knows he
experiences in actual buildings. His final
prescription, that photographers simply tell
it as it is, assumes that they have the choice,
on the one hand, of just showing buildings
as they look or, on the other, of prettifying
in order to falsify them (or in order to make
pretty pictures). This is a familiar belief:
the flattering portrait may be the one the
sitter wants, but the inept one is understood
to be telling the unpleasant truth. What is
remarkable in this idea is not the thought The Editor's Mode
that subjects can be falsified in photo-
graphs, which of course they can, but the
faith that the camera, if we but leave it
alone, can easily tell the whole truth. No
skill is needed to record things as they really
are, only to falsify them.
There are, of course, some qualities in a
photograph for which the taker cannot
claim credit. When a print shows every
brick in a facade, it is no thanks to the skill
of the photographer that it does so, but
instead to the quality of his equipment.
However, if the photograph shows the
facade with clarity or even eloquence, then
that is a result of his skill. Nor are clarity
and eloquence merely frosting on what
would otherwise still tell us all the facts.
Without clarity and eloquence the facts are
simply not available to us. The vertical
aerial photograph crammed with data is for
our purposes quite inarticulate, almost like
a scrambled message. When by chance an
aerial print makes our kind of pictorial
sense, that photograph may well be defec-
tive by the standards to which it was made;
if it was not taken under unsuitable lighting
conditions to begin with, it may at least
have been printed to too high a contrast. In
architectural photography there is always a
distinction to be made between recording
facts and doing so in such a way that the
viewer can see them.
But, if the skill in photography lies in using
the camera eloquently, the essential act of
photography lies in the choice of what is
photographed. Architects have paid archi-
tectural photographers the (at least in-
tended) compliment of assuming that pho-
tography works as architecture does; ie, that
it is not a question of what brief you fill but
how you fill it. While Fitch's call to honesty
may simply mean that the honest photo-
grapher is the one who proves Fitch's
points, at face value it seems the equivalent
of saying: have an honest photographer
photograph a Playboy bunny, and then we
would find out what a day in her life was
really like. And in fact he (and we) may well
find that the architecturalmagazines do to CervinRobinson1969(facing
their subject in general what the skin maga- page,top), Kallmann,
McKinnell & Knowles' Boston
zines do to theirs. Each shows outstanding
City Hall. One hostile
examples of its subject matter photo-
photograph by Peter Blake
graphed so as to show off their best points. (facing page, bottom) from
In real life those examples must presumably his God's Own Junk Yard of
satisfy other and' broader appetites than 1964,Holt, Rinehart&
those of magazine readers. How well they Winston, and a set of them
really perform we never learn, even from by Ian Nairn from "Outrage"
the accompanyingtexts, on however full an of 1955.
experience of the examples shown the
editors mean those texts to seem based.

Just as the alternative to the Playboycenter- A hostile choice of

fold may not be so much a more accurate anonymous photographs laid
rendering of a bunny's day, or even a more out with hostility (above)
talented rendering of it, so much as it may from the November 1971
be an Arbus photograph, perhaps, or an ArchitecturalForum.
Avedon (a different immediatesubject,that Editor'sMode, subcategory,
The Sublime (middle), New
is, as well as a different point of view). So Yorkpublic housing (anon)
perhaps what is wrong with architectural and the fall of Pruitt-Igoe
photography is that we still assume what (Lee Balterman,Time/Life
the Luceempire long ago thought: that you Inc) as seen in the August
can hire the talented and apply them to 1975 ArchitecturalReview.
your briefs. Walker Evans 1936 (bottom),
South Carolina,MOMA
Though it does not have the same shocking collection.
character as the anti-fashion photography
that concentrates on the deformed and the
decaying, it happens that there is an alter-
native tradition to that of the standard
architecturalphotograph. This is the one
which includes the work of Walker Evans
and also of the "Townscape" (and proto-
"Townscape") editors of ArchitecturalRe-
view, starting in the late 1930s.7 Photo-
graphers David Plowden and Stephen
Shore may be thought of as working in the
tradition now, as indeed may the firm of
Venturi & Rauch in the photographs that
currently issue from it. This tradition has
two aspects. One of them tends to interpret
the present in terms of a heroic past or to An Alternative Tradition
show it as the decaying remains of a classi-
cal age. Its images may be taken with lenses
that compress and foreshorten objects and
spaces. If it is associatedwith a text, the two
are equal but quite separate-as in Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men. Its subject is a
national one.

In the alternative aspect of this tradition a

photographer/writer has happened upon
something about which he thought a point
might be made, and he has taken some
pictures for his readers' edification. The
perspective of the lens is a "normal"one.
The text may indeed make a perceptive
point about what is shown; alternatively its
tone can be knowing and elitist, sometimes
officiously so. The subjectmatter consists of
the remains of an older tradition of arti-
facts. They are still to be found,one is given
to understand, if you know where to look
for them, and one of the photographer/wri-
ter's points is that he does.

While historicallyconscious,both aspects of

this tradition put a special emphasis on the
place and year in which the photographs
were made. Where subjects and their dates
are identified, it is always made clear that
the buildings shown were all photogra-
phed recently, and the text makes one 13

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 awareof present-dayattitudestoward them.
The effect of all this is to emphasizeboth
the photographerand his point of view.
With or without a text, the viewpoint is
disinterested,wryor ironic(thoughit may
well be misinterpretedas compassionate).
Photographs in this tradition tend ulti-
mately to give us what we take to be the
authentic,magisterialsummaryof theirage.
However,in the sameway that we tend in
Americato call an architectureBrutalistor
dumb-and-ordinary which is in realitypic-
turesque,so this traditionof architectural
photography has tended to be called "docu-
mentary," though it too is clearly pictur-
esque.8And it maywell not representa way
out for architecturalphotography.Likethe
anti-fashion photography mentioned
above, it tells a differenttruth;9and its
usefulnessas applieddirectlyto new archi-
tectureis somewhatlimited,becausethen
its disinterestandironybecomeparticularly
apparent.

Changesand a Prescription
If the architectural photograph in the pic-
turesque tradition seems to accrue value
with passing years, at least as compared to
the standard professional photograph, the
latter undergoes a curious transformation of
its own with time. When a building is new,
a set of photographs is taken. A number of
these pictures will be used in the official
publication of the building in architectural
magazines. Thereafter, these journals may,
when a writer has occasion to refer to the
building, use one of the pictures to tell the
reader which building he is talking about. A
single picture may appear in books to pin
down a reference to the building.Often the
single picture will repeatedly be the same
photograph. It will have become the iconic
view of that building. Originally, the whole
set of pictures could hardly have done
justice to the building.Eventuallyeveryone
knows the building, or feels he does, and the
mere appearance of the iconic view in the
smallest of sizes will serve its purpose of
reawakening the viewer's set of ideas about
the known building.

Later, photographs of buildings that are no

longer new will be used in historic studies.
Though it may seem unfair to make the
generalization, I do not think that architec-
tural historians are good at using photo-
graphs. They are too trusting. Either they
assume that what they see in a photograph
is the significant truth; or, knowing that
something forms part of a building they are
describing, they may not notice that it does
not appear in their own photograph used in
illustration. I suspect that the reason for
this carelessness is that, though historians
all know something of photographing, the
provenance of photographs used as slides in
teaching can be stated only awkwardly (as
compared, say, to the way credit can be
given in a book or magazine) so that the
quality of a photograph as an artifact in
itself is drastically played down. Even histo-
rians' own slides are not used in situations
14 in which criticism of them is as likely as it is
%1975 by Cervin Robinson.
2"Outrage,"ArchitectureReview, 117, 364-460
(June 1955).
James Marston Fitch, review in New York
Times, December 25, 1966, p 6.
4]amesMarston Fitch, "SinglePoint Perspec-
tive," ArchitecturalForum, 140, 89 (March
1974).
5Melville C Branch,City Planning and Aerial
Information (Cambridge:Harvard University
Press, 1971), p 31.
6In "ArchitecturalPhotogrammetryin Restora-
tion," Building Research, 1, 18-19 (September-
October1964), Borchers recommends a maxi-
mum depth of 20 times base distance between
two camerastations.
'The official pronouncement of "Townscape"
seems to have occurredonly in 1949-Archi-
tecturalReview, 106, 354-374 (December)--
nevertheless, the groundworkfor it was clearly
being laid in the late thirties.
8"Townscape," on the other hand, always
called itself picturesque;see I de Wolfe, "Town-
scape,"ibid.
9Otherwise,the differences between the two
alternate approaches is what is striking. We
more than half believe in Evans'sAmerica;and,
reportedly,Sabbionetawas inundatedwith
architects after ArchitecturalReview's "Italian
Townscape"issue (131 []une 1962]). We ad-
mire the style of the anti-fashion photographers,
but, having admired it, we do not thereafter see
the world with their eyes; we are more than
willing to leave their cautionarygrotesques to
the pages of books. The picturesqueevokes nos-
talgia; the other quite apparentlydoes not.
1oVincent] Scully,]r, The Shingle Style (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p 10n.
The tendency on the part of historians to disre-
gard photographs as objects in themselves is
so general as to make it remarkablethat Nikolaus
Pevsner should have had many of the buildings
illustrated in An Outline of European Architec-
ture re-photographedfor the jubilee edition of
that book. The explanation may lie in his long
association with an architecturalmagazine.

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 in the preparation of a magazine issue.
When historians write, the photographs
they have on hand are accepted by their
publishers largely without question (be-
cause publishers do not want to pay for
better ones, as a magazine would, and
indeed leave the cost of pictures to the
authors) and are slapped so many to a page
at the back of their books.
Vincent Scully, in The Shingle Style, makes
some perceptive observations on the effect
of techniques of rendering reproductionof
Nineteenth-Century architecture and then
remarksthat, after the use of reproductions
of photographs became common in the
middle 1880s, "now the object to be copied
[ie, a building] appears before the architect
untouched, as it were, by 19th-century
hands ..."o0 In other words, when we look
at a photograph of a building,we are seeing
the real thing.
Where Fitch wants photographs to seem
the real thing, the architectural historian
assumes that that's what they already are.
One may well wonder whether it is not the
users of photographs, instead of the profes-
sional takers, whose performance leaves
something to be desired. Those who de-
mand more of photographs than they can
possibly provide assume that they have
already provided all without noticing that
they haven't.
Prior to the 1920s photographs and texts in
architecturalmagazines stood on their own.
There were separate sections for one and
the other. A successfulunion of pictures and
text was one of the achievements of the
1930s. Both photographer and writer, se-
parate specialists, were brought into a disci-
(facing page) From John Piper, 'The Nautical
Style" (top, left), photographs byJohn Piper
andJ M Richards, ArchitecturalReview 1938.
From Walker Evans, "The London Look"(top,
right), ArchitecturalForum,April 1958.
Stephen Shore, "HunleyDrive, Los Angeles,
California,6/16/75" (which includes Pelli's
Design Center).
Cervin Robinson 1966 (right), Criminal
Courts,Municipal, Tribune,American Tract
Society and Times buildings,New York City.
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plined union. What was said was docu-
mented with photographs; what was
illustrated was, as it were, given its verbal
defense. But what were virtues then have
become faults now; then, the editor of an
architectural magazine who presented ex-
cellence in the Beaux-Arts camp as well as
the Modern was damned, while catholicity
is a virtue now. In the 1930s the photo-
grapher was applauded for skillfully and
enticingly showing the little in the new
style that was being realized; and the union
of text and pictures was more persuasive
then than now. Even in 1958, if a magazine
retouched neighboring buildings away, it
was only to show the way the future would
look anyway; now, to retouch signs of
defective glazing in a major building is
irresponsiblejournalism.
What Fitch has done in effect is to point out
to his readers that the photograph is no
more what it was assumed to be twenty-five
years ago than is architecture.In the same
way that architectureis turning to a modest
inquiry into its own nature, no longer
assuming that it can solve all problems set
to it, much less reform society, it may be
time for architects to recognize that the
photograph is only what a picture has
always been. Perhaps we must even ac-
knowledge that what a photograph can
show us is not really how something looks
but only how, under certain particularcir-
cumstances,it photographs.
Given that photography is as recalcitrantas
it seems (considering what has been ex-
pected of it), we may well wonder what is to
be done with the medium.There are several
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things we can do. We can look with suspi-
cion on uses of photography that suggest
that pictures tell the whole story. We can
aim to see photographs more as objects
than we have and can be less trusting that
they show us the essential truthor that they
even necessarily confirm what we believe
the truth to be. Learning from the pictur-
esque tradition, we can encourage those
who assemble magazines and books to
adopt an attitude not of disinterest and
irony, for that would be to give up trying,
but of skepticism.
And we can learn to readphotographs.Like
aerial photo-interpretation, interpretation
of architecturalphotographs depends both
on our knowing what photography does to
a subject and on our having learned on our
own, on the ground, as it were, the concom-
itants of the sorts of things we may see in
pictures. We must learn what the user of a
particular new building (on a particular
spot on earth) learns from it. In order to do
justice to photographs we need experience
of both photography and of the world. Fitch
can, after all, observe that Learning from
Las Vegas has neglected what he feels it
has, not because he was himself misled by
the book, but because it does not mention
the facts of life he has learned from expe-
rience to associate with a desert climate.
When we do learn to read photographs, we
may well be surprisedto discover (consider-
ing that we have had to meet them halfway)
what a wealth of informationwe can obtain
from them, how accuratelythey can be read,
and with what concentrated intensity a
photograph at its strongest can be filled.
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