Mark Chalmers

“I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”

So wrote Saul Leiter, one of the pioneers of “fine art” colour photography.

Nowadays we have a huge visual appetite. While there was always a sneaking suspicion that some architects designed buildings primarily for the way they looked, rather than the way they worked, this has gradually developed into architects designing buildings which photograph well.

Saul Leiter wasn’t the first to use colour photography; in the 1940’s, it was possible to buy Kodachrome transparency film in many different sizes, including 35mm, 120 roll film, and even 5x4 sheet film, which Kodak stopped selling decades before they eventually gave up on Kodachrome. During the early years of World War Two, the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information organised photographers such as Jack Delano, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott to drive around rural America capturing the effects of the Depression on America’s rural population, and the country’s mobilisation for war.

The colour transparencies are particularly vivid because they reveal a world which until then had only been viewed in black-and-white. The images subsequently formed an exhibition and a book called “Bound for Glory”, and it’s been argued that they mark the historic divide between the monochrome pre-modern world, and the brilliant hues of the present.

Nevertheless, that was seen as purely documentary photography, and it took a long time for colour to be accepted in other areas such as nature, landscape and topographical photography. Saul Leiter was one of the first fine art photographers to use colour, primarily shooting big cities on the eastern seaboard of America in the 1950’s and 60’s, followed by Stephen Shore and Richard Misrach in the 1970’s with their views of Main Street and abandoned townships. In Britain, the publication of Paul Graham’s photobook, “A1 The Great North Road” became a landmark.

By contrast, press photographers and advertising men were much quicker to see the potential of colour, when four-colour litho printing became affordable in the mass media. One milestone was the birth of the colour supplement in Sunday newspapers in the late 1960’s, and John Bulmer became famous for mastering colour transparency film, by all accounts often slightly underexposing Kodachrome 25 to make the colours deeper and more saturated.

Yet for architectural photographers working in the 1960’s, such as Henk Snoek, John Donat and Eric de Maré, black and white was still the only type of photography to be taken seriously, often shot at high resolution on a rising-front camera such as the 5x4 inch “large format” Arca Swiss or Linhof Technika, which took forever to set up. For speed, they might shoot 120 medium format roll film using a Hasselblad. There are probably many reasons for this, but colour was felt to be fugitive, it distracted the eye from the tones which describe the building’s form, and colour was for the advertising man rather than the serious artist.

By the early 1980’s, Agfa, Fuji and Kodak had produced colour emulsions good enough for everyone to rely on, but the recent death of Kodachrome transparency film – once popular for its warm, fairly saturated colours – underlines not only the onslaught of digital photography, but also the progress of ever-more vivid emulsions such as Fuji’s Velvia and Fortia positive films, and Agfa’s Ultra colour negative film. Over the past couple of decades, the colours in our world appear to have become more and more vibrant, thanks to these films. For the past 25 years or so, Photoshop has enabled the saturation and contrast of firstly digital scans, then digital photos, to be ramped up even further.

Chromophiles can create unreal, super-saturated images which sing when they portray the neons of Times Square in New York, or the Ginza district of Tokyo – but lack fidelity when trying to capture the subtle light and muted colours of Scotland on a wet, autumn evening. The soft, watery, diffuse light you find at times in Scotland means that our environment lacks strong contrast, but makes up for that in tonal range.

Yet photographers believe that there is a style that sells. Practices feel the same. What were once sober “record pictures” are now glossy P.R. shots designed to shout loudly, through dramatic lighting, high contrast and boosted saturation. To publicity-hungry architects, being ignored is not a privilege: being ignored is the ultimate disaster. We’re all in competition, so you’d better eat fast otherwise someone else will clear your plate.

Rather like fashion models have a “good side”, and fashion photographers used soft lighting and flattering print film to reveal it, some buildings offer a “good angle”, which is often shot at dawn when the light is golden. It’s been said that James Stirling’s post modernism – typified by the Staatsgallerie in Stuttgart – is a retinal architecture, with bright dayglow colours conceived for colour reproduction in magazines. From then on, architecture was envisaged in Technicolor.

As a result, the style that sells is a cliché style which the majority of architecture magazines adhere to. Buildings sit under Mediterranean skies; there are usually dusk shots relying on artificial lighting in the buildings to create drama; outside and in, and both streets and building interiors have been emptied of people.

However, attempts have been made before to portray a different reality. John Donat tried to apply the “reportage” photography approach to architectural subjects. The results were the Architectural Review’s “Manplan” issues in 1969 and 1970, which posited a humanist view of how we portray buildings, as well as how we design them. Manplan paid less attention to formal tectonics and concentrated instead on how people experience and use buildings.

Donat’s contemporary John Szarkowski also felt that photographers should abandon large-format photography and use smaller cameras such as the 35mm SLR, coupled with the new fast monochrome films developed in 1960’s, which made it easier to capture the movement of people. As a result, Manplan presented a series of grainy 35mm film photos, and the buildings became a backdrop for the Theatre of the World.

An architectural photographer once told me that smaller formats, like 120 or 35mm were useless for serious architectural photography, as they lacked resolution. Fine, I like a challenge, although when the lab scans 35mm film at 18MB (around 3000 pixels across) I can barely see grain on “pro” transparency film, and likewise with 120 film at 80MB (around 5000 pixels across). I’m well aware of the race for pixels amongst digital camera buyers – but I think the format snobbery stemmed from a certain froideur toward lesser photographers who didn’t use 5x4 technical cameras.

Hobby photographers regard those expensive large format 5x4 beasts, and their digital successors such as the Phase One and Leaf medium format digital backs, with awe. Yet any camera is just a light-tight box with glass on the front, and a gadget which controls the amount of light that strikes the film or sensor behind it. Equipment is just a means to an end, and arguably technique should be invisible too.

You really don’t need to know which camera, which lens, which settings were used: you can enjoy the privilege of ignoring all that. The only thing that counts is that the person who took the photo was there at the crucial time; yet the amateur still believes a better camera will make him a better photographer; rather than practice, application, and dedication.

On my travels around the internet, I came across some exchanges on a Drum & Bass forum where there were dozens of threads about “photography”. In fact, they were actually threads about upgrading your camera. "I just bought a new camera," boasted one, “and for a bargain price on Ebay”. The replies he received included, “I just got a buttered slice of toast, missed out on the Lurpack but got some St Ivel instead. Its spec is: white bread, St Ivel Gold spread, housed on a standard kitchen plate. I'm going to use it to fill a toast-sized hole in my stomach and increase the levels of available carbohydrate in my body.”

And then, “I just got a new light bulb, I missed out on the 40w version but bagged a 60w. Its spec is: 240 volt, pearl white, twist connection.” “Not bad,” replied Mr Toast, “though I would have gone with bayonet connection.”

One architectural photographer I know uses a Phase One back attached to a Sinar front, and shoots tethered to a laptop. However I recently spent a wee while with another photographer, who shoots fashion and ads as well as architecture. He was shooting some images for a feature in Urban Realm using a digital SLR, and whereas his camera cost much less than the Phase One, his technique actually delivered images at a higher resolution and provided a bigger dynamic range.

Plus he could sling the camera around his neck and move rapidly to catch the light, something that was never possible with the Mamiya RZ67 he used before (it was built like an armoured car), far less the Phase One plus Sinar plus laptop combination which the “architectural photographer” uses.

The conclusion I drew is that architectural photographers have many hang-ups, and that perhaps contributes to why they take so many clichéd shots, such as those moody monochromes, huge prints with “edge to edge” sharpness, unpeopled interiors which look the Bomb has just dropped, or the omnipresent glowing glass box at dusk shot.

I learned that there are other ways to photograph buildings.