Camera Constructs is a brimful compendium packed with a rich variety of relational investigations into photography, architecture, and urban space. The book enters a field that has grown considerably since the mid-1980s, when architectural historians heeded Marshall McLuhan’s (and other media theorists’) dictums and began to study architecture and its media, and architecture as medium, with a new seriousness. From early groundbreaking studies to more recent focused treatments, the media content of architecture has been laid bare in written text; Alison and Peter Smithson, neo-avant-garde groups like Archigram and Superstudio, and a range of postmodern architects laid similar cards on the table in projects and propaganda, even as McLuhan was writing. Within a body of growing historical literature on this subject, the covert and overt agency of photography in architecture has become more evident. Despite impressive publications (many from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, others from the collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects [RIBA]), we still lack a focused analysis of what might best be called “photographic architecture,” one that reflects on the roles that photography has played in the history of the built environment. Such a study would target not only the effects of photographs on the design of modern buildings but also, and perhaps more crucially, the role of photography as a primary agent of architecture’s history and, through that, of architectural pedagogy. Recent work on such topics includes the many publications and exhibitions of the late Robert Elwall, a driving force on the British scene and curator of photography at RIBA. Partly through Elwall and his remarkable team, and partly through the strength of British engagements in mediatic architecture all the way from William Henry Fox Talbot to Reyner Banham, the study of British photography and architecture has been especially robust in recent years. Camera Constructs is one result of this seething scholarly brew.

Camera Constructs is divided into four sections. The first surveys published photographs of architecture in the historiography of modernism, and includes chapters that explore the work of photographer Frank Yerbury; architects Le Corbusier, Hans Scharoun, and Charles and Ray Eames; editor Andrew Mead; as well as the published photographs of middle-class houses in postwar Germany. Section 2 treats architecture and the city imagined through photographic depiction. Here the second of the book’s two editors, Timothy Wray, contributes a thought-provoking chapter on Surrealism and photographic architecture. Other notable contributions in this section include an essay on aerial photography, and one on the history of architectural models (in photographs) that is pendant to one on contemporary tilt-shift photography, where aerial viewpoints make constructed architecture look like miniaturized models. This section also includes an essay on Google Street View that notes that Google—a private corporation—is now the global topographer of record. While the chapter can do no more than open a series of questions that relate to this fact, the reader is keen to learn more.

Sections 3 (“Interpretative Constructs”) and 4 (“Photography in Design Practices”) turn to a series of particular historical analyses. Like the first pair, these two sections are counterposed. As section 3 details the ways in which photographs interpret subject matter, section 4 seeks instead to uncover how those photographic interpretations have altered the practice of architecture since the mid-nineteenth century. The former includes chapters on Walker Evans, Ed Ruscha’s photographic books, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Josef Koudelka, and Michael Wesely. This section develops the notion of multiplicity of photographic interpretation, an idea first limned in the opening section of the book. These analyses clarify how wide the range of photographic effects on architectural thought may actually be; in turn, we see the potential impact of these differences, both here and in the book’s final section. There, authors turn to the work of László Moholy-Nagy, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eileen Gray, and the New Brutalists to illustrate the remarkable influence that photographic media had on practices of architecture throughout the twentieth century. The book ends with two chapters on stereography and a playful sketch by Nat Chard of “drawing machines” designed to filter vision much as the camera does.

The opening chapter of section 2 references psychoanalytic notions of the uncanny and of haunting to describe photographic practices and the effect of photographs in history. But the book itself contains ghosts, spirits of the best kind. Elwall died in March, 2012 (his work was celebrated at a conference at Cambridge University in April where Camera Constructs was announced), and his influence appears throughout. The ghost of the late Robin Evans, architectural historian and theorist, percolates throughout the essays in this book as well, and we can be grateful for the visitation. Many of the authors knew and worked with Evans when he was producing his most influential work on drawing techniques and the function of media in architectural practice, working both in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts (where this author also came under his spell). In addition to Evans, we also sense the presence of Banham, whose Concrete Atlantis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) broached the issue of photographic historiography in clear, upbraiding prose, a landmark in the study of photographic architecture. The aura of Beatriz Colomina, the spirit who lives, also floats through these pages, although here the authors perhaps follow Roland Barthes, granting the dead greater agency than the living in the mystical world of photographic imaging.

Early publications dedicated to architecture in photographs often gave readers the impression that revelation was at hand, and Banham’s was no exception. The sense seemed to be that if we could release authentic building from the prison of photographic appearance, the problems of architectural modernity (capitalism, alienation, fakery, disinvestment in the built environment) might be solved. More sober analysis has followed, attending to post-structuralism and literary theory more generally, and endorsing the salience of the “rhetoric of the image” that Barthes so persuasively explicated. In a few instances, Camera Constructs returns us to the earlier phase, where the riddle of photographic architecture awaits the solution of architectural reality, where the illusory appearance of the image conceals authentic architectural experience. But this is not widespread; the book seeks rather to explore the potential to rethink architecture through techniques of photographic imaging. At times, it is caught in a familiar dilemma, according its subject the very agency it seeks to unmask—as when photogenic appeal (or lack thereof) is equated with professional success in the work of architects without adequate amounts of either. At other times, the book accomplishes something quite different. This volume, like other recent photographic histories, opens the box that we will not close again—the box in which photography is no longer one thing, but instead is many things, differing in kind as well as in degree. The materiality of photographic images grabs our attention, where the differences between, for example, Google Street View and Atget’s photographs of Paris emerge through juxtaposition.

Camera Constructs is a broadly inclusive survey of a wide range of contemporary investigations on many aspects of photographic architecture, presented in the form of short essays. It contrasts with a rather different collection of essays on a similar subject, Das Auge der Architektur (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2011) from the Eikones group in Basel. Both of these collections make ample room for future investigations into architecture and its photographic imaging. One such investigation might further deconstruct the commercial relationships between architects, journals, and publics as they developed throughout the twentieth century. Camera Constructs is not a sustained analysis of the market mechanisms of photography insofar as they have regulated the professional practice of architecture since the advent of mass-printed images after about 1895, and the book does not claim to be so, although several chapters touch on this subject. An essay by Robin Wilson on Mead’s editorial practices at The Architects’ Journal takes up architectural marketing and the agency of journals, editors, and photographers in the development of architectural discourse. It follows an essay by editor Andrew Higgott on Yerbury that shows how photographers and writers on architecture did not always move in lockstep with professional practitioners. These two are critical staging essays that demonstrate how photography was used to construct architectural discourse by a range of actors. Other essays explore the importance of models as marketing tools for architects, as in Davide Deriu’s analysis of the images used, most impressively, perhaps, in L’Architecture vivante. Deriu’s larger project is summarized here; and the editorial counterpoint with Mark Morris’s chapter on contemporary model photography is nicely done. A further essay by Steven Jacobs on Ed Ruscha delineates the role of photography within the commercial marketing of the built environment. This subset of chapters, drawn from different sections of the book, nevertheless allows us to see photographic architecture as a marketing tool of considerable power.

Similarly, other essays question the mechanisms of vision and interpretation through photographic images. Some of these take up psychoanalytic questions; others delve into the work of Evans and Barthes to probe historically specific cases. In addition to his essay on haunting noted above, a second essay by Wray on Josef Koudelka brings this elusive figure into architectural discourse. Mary Woods has similarly contributed an insightful essay on Walker Evans’s scripting of Havana in the 1950s, as has Tanis Hinchcliffe on aerial vision—again a cogent analysis that recalls the author’s earlier work on planning and photography. Higgott returns in the last section with an essay on New Brutalism, focusing on the extraordinary vision of Nigel Henderson and his impact on architecture in 1950s Britain. Richard Difford and Penelope Haralambidou consider stereoscopic photography in relation to architectural space, a prefiguring of today’s immersive digital environments. The collection, where it necessarily peers briefly into all these developments, does so in order to range freely over the available terrain. The editors have been broadly inclusive, perhaps wanting to give readers a bird’s eye view over a wide area, enabling us to dive in where we find ourselves most inclined to do so. This eclectic book suffers from no oppressive ideological bias, other than a preference for plurality. And that is a bias we may all thankfully celebrate.