of Architectural Photography has become a con-
vention that has persisted to the present day.
The disruptions of emergence of the Nazi regime,
World War II, and its immediate aftermath saw
exiles and refugees fleeing Europe in the late
1930s, and again in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In architecture, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and
several other Bauhaus masters founded large archi-
tectural offices in the United States, all in need of
good advertising photography. Mies became asso-
ciated with Chicago’s New Bauhaus (later Institute
of Design) which trained many photographers in
the ‘‘whole human’’ philosophy of La ́szlo ́Moholy-
Nagy, emphasizing industrial, product, and Archi-
tectural Photography. These expatriates joined
other Europeans, notably Richard Neutra and
Rudolf Schindler, who had already emigrated to
the Los Angeles area in the 1920s. Neutra, an
expert photographer himself, often told the story
that in need of a good photographer in the late
1930s, he encountered Julius Shulman. Shulman
had no professional training and was told by Neu-
tra how to look at and photograph buildings.
Legend or not, it was the beginning of an outstand-
ing career which lasted for half a century. Shulman
photographed not only every design by Neutra and
Schindler but nearly every modern building in Cali-
fornia. Modern American architecture would not
have achieved its outstanding international reputa-
tion without Shulman’s work.
The late 1940s with their postwar reconstruction
and improving economies across Europe, Japan,
and the United States, gave birth to a number of
significant practitioners of Architectural Photogra-
phy, each individually successful and important in
his own country: Ezra Stoller and George Cserna in
the United States; Eric de Mare ́ in the United
Kingdom; Heinrich Heidersberger, Arthur Pfau,
and Karl-Hugo Schmoelz in Germany; Lennart
Olson, Erik Hansen, and Carl Gustav Rosenberg
in Sweden; Jean-Philippe Charbonnier and Robert
Doisneau in France; Eva Besnyo ̈and Cas Oorthuis
in The Netherlands; and Studio Vasari and Paolo
Monti in Italy, among many others. Important
collaborations among photographers and archi-
tects began, like the life-long relation between
Luis Barraga ́n, Mathias Goeritz, and Armando
Salas Portugal in Mexico, the latter being the pho-
tographer of both the architect and the sculptor.
Some architects were married to photographers
whose careers were secondary to those of their
husbands: most prominent among them were
Binia Bill and Ursula Wolf-Schneider.
The 1950s saw the first cross-over artists in
Architectural Photography: writers such as Wright
Morris followed Walker Evans, historians Martin
Huerlimann and G.E. Kidder Smith were as com-
petent as photographers as they were experts in
their fields. Even fine art cross pollinated with
Architectural Photography; the Americans Clar-
ence John Laughlin, Jerry Uelsman, and other
artists in photography used architecture as the
metaphoric base of their ideas. A similar use of
architecture is found in European fine art photo-
graphy of the 1950s, which was further deeply
influenced by existentialist philosophy: the Paris
stories by the Dutch photographer Ed van der
Elsken and the Swiss Rene ́ Groebli needed the
city’s streets and places as much as Bill Brandt’s
perspectives or the work of the Germanfotoform
group and Robert Ha ̈usser’s heroic pictures. The
same can be said about the world-wide work of
Henri Cartier-Bresson, the New York images of
Andre ́Kerte ́sz, the Spanish series by Inge Morath
and W. Eugene Smith, and a number of other
photographic journalists whose photographs close-
ly related their subjects to the architectural spaces
in which they appeared.
All of these works influenced Architectural
Photography by the introduction of the city scape
as subject. Whether inspired by writings of theor-
ists like Kevin Lynch, Lewis Mumford, or William
Hubbard on the importance of the image of the
city, or simply actively involved in cultural move-
ments of arts and literature, photographers such as
John Szarkowski, Cervin Robinson, Morley Baer,
and others began to document the conglomeration
of what had grown within one century of American
building, mainly in the big cities. Some, like Evelyn
Hofer, returned to their European roots and—by
titles likeThe Stones of Florence—even to the Arts-
and-Crafts movement. There was also a return to
one of the foundations of Architectural Photogra-
phy: the preservation of monuments. In Chicago,
Richard Nickel meticulously recorded every detail
of historic buildings as they were being torn down;
he paid with his life when part of the building
collapsed while he was photographing the demoli-
tion of Louis Sullivan’s Stock Exchange building.
In photographing the demolition of New York’s
Pennsylvania Station in 1964, Norman McGrath
succeeded in bringing back the political sense of
building preservation that it had had in the nine-
teenth century.
Inventories of buildings to be preserved or lost
were always politically influenced, but when mod-
ernism began to become stale in the late 1960s this
field of Architectural Photography rapidly began
to grow as a base of citizenship initiatives con-
cerned about the integrity of their neighborhood.ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY