The camera always lies

Everyone knows about architecture being frozen music. The source of that conceit may be debated, but its validity is timeless and certain. For all its weightiness, architecture plays with ethereal proportion, harmony, resonance and delight: the stuff of music.

But architecture is more fundamentally about the management of light and space. Or, at least, that’s how architects see it. So photography makes better sense of architecture than any other medium does: there is something congruent between the fixed optical geometry of a camera and the way we perceive buildings.

And because images are more readily accessible than travel to remote sites, everyone’s experience of world architecture is, at least initially, based on the photographic record, not the real thing. If you think about it, that is strange. It’s as if we formed our taste in music and literature from reading reviews alone.

Significantly, the very first photographs were of buildings, not of people: Henry Fox Talbot’s tracery at Lacock or Daguerre’s view of Paris’s Boulevard du Temple, for example. The reason for this? Given an exposure time in hours for the earliest photographs, stationary buildings were easier to depict than busy, fidgety humans who left, as people do, blurred traces.

In Paris, Eugène Atget began recording the pre-modern city in the years just before the first world war. But his lens was not neutral. Lenses never are. His haunting and haunted record inspired the surrealists. Cameras lie to tell the truth: documentary photography turns out to be as much theatre as fact.

So the champions of modernism understood how photography could help their cause. The Bauhaus slogan was ‘art and technology: a new unity’. Appropriately, what we sense of the famous Bauhaus building is based on photographs, as few of us have been to Dessau.

Berenice Abbott was the discoverer of Eugène Atget.