Camera Constructs. Photography, Architecture and the Modern City

Camera Constructs contains a selection of essays by a range of architectural historians and theorists exploring the relationships between photography, architecture and the modern city. The work discussed includes commissioned architectural photography, art practices and architects' uses of the camera in design processes. This is the first book to reflect critically on the varied interactions of these different practices, and to engage with photography's roles not only in documenting architecture, but in defining how we imagine it and influencing its processes and forms. The title thus on the one hand opposes the medium of photography and the materiality of construction, but on the other can be read as saying that the camera invariably constructs what it depicts - the photograph is not a simple representation of an external reality, but constructs its own meanings and reconstructs its subjects.