The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time

About this book

Buildings inhabit and symbolize time giving form to history and making public space an index of the past. Photographs are made of time; they are literally projections of past states of their subjects. This visually striking meditation on architecture in photography explores the intersection between these two ways of embodying the past. Photographs of buildings Joel Smith argues are simultaneously the agents vehicles and cargo of social memory. In The Life and Death of Buildings photographers as canonical as Bernd and Hilla Becher Laura Gilpin Lewis W. Hine and William Henry Fox Talbot enter into visual dialogue with amateurs architects propagandists and insurance adjusters. Rather than examine photographers aims in isolation Smith considers how their images reflect and inflect the passage of time. Much as a buildings shifting function and circumstances substantially alter its significance a photograph comes to be coauthored by history growing layers of meaning to which its maker had no access.