his unique, intimate approach to architectural sub-
jects. With Abbott and Evans, a firm tradition
of Architectural Photography was established
that concentrated on the accumulation of large
numbers of images, especially of vernacular archi-
tecture. Abbott’s example was followed by photo-
graphers such as Chicago-based Harold Allen and
Clemens Kalischer, whereas Evans found fol-
lowers throughout the American continent, not-
ably Wright Morris and David Plowden, who
used a panoramic camera to capture wide sections
of the built environment.
One subgenre within architectural documenta-
tion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies had social purposes as well. Before 1900, a
number of authors and social reformers had out-
lined the effects of living conditions on health and
criminal activity, and photographers soon took up
the cry. Thomas Annan photographed the old
closes of Glasgow in the 1860s, Jacob Riis worked
for city authorities in New York in the 1890s, and
Lewis Hine’s seminal photographs of New York
City tenements were taken for the Red Cross
from 1910 to 1930. The Berliner Hermann Lichte
photographed for the Prussian health insurance
industry around 1913, and anonymous colleagues
were commissioned for similar work in the German
cities of Kassel and Heidelberg. Many of these
photographs were taken with small format cameras
and flash and captured candid images of families
living in neglected, rundown tenements in squalor
and misery. Most of the architecture shown in these
series had been erected in the nineteenth century,
and it was the clear intention of both the photo-
graphers and their patrons that these buildings
were to be dismantled as soon as possible. This
application of Architectural Photography thus
had the function of destroying the past and making
way for future structures. These socially concerned
series were part of the emergence of modernism,
with Architectural Photography, changing its func-
tions and form as did architecture itself.
In the realm of architectural practice, photogra-
phy proves that a design has been executed, a
building has been erected, or a bridge constructed.
This documentation is now an integral part of the
business practice of architects. One of the earliest
architects to exist on private commissions and run
a modern, professional office was the Beaux Arts
architect Henry Hobson Richardson of Boston,
Massachusetts. He was scrupulous in hiring the
best photographers of his time. These images were
not only used for covering the walls of his office
and impressing prospective clients, but Richardson
also arranged to have them reproduced in architec-
tural magazines—at his own cost—in one of the
earliest appearances of Architectural Photography
as a public relations strategy. The photographs
Richardson commissioned focused primarily on
the idea of the building, often showing a small but
representative detail that best depicted his architec-
tural and design ideas. To accentuate the building
itself, when possible, Richardson set his structures
on small hills so they had to be approached from a
lower level, dominating and further impressing the
viewer. He instructed his photographers to dupli-
cate and even accentuate this experience in their
photographs, creating portraits of his building
more than strict documents.
This method of depiction was taken up and
promulgated, somewhat ironically, when the Arts-
and-Crafts movement spread through the United
Kingdom and Central Europe around 1900. Al-
though architects such as Charles Robert Ashbee,
William Richard Lethaby, Mackay Hugh Baillie
Scott, and Charles F.A. Voysey rejected any con-
nection to the Beaux Arts school in architecture,
they asked their photographers to set up their
shots not only utilizing a low viewpoint, but
using the raking light available when the sun was
low on the horizon early in the morning or late in
the day, or by photographing on a day when the
sky was filled with dark clouds. It was at this time
that Architectural Photography became a profes-
sion in its own right, and when some architects
themselves took up photography, the two profes-
sions merged. Important photographs have been
made by architect-photographers. Heinrich Ru ̈ck-
wardt of Berlin, published hisArchitectural Details
as portfolios in enormous sizes—up to 6080 cm —
from 1895 onwards, with a great number of pho-
tographers following his lead, each developing a
different approach to documenting buildings both
new and old.
Among the important architectural photogra-
phers around 1900 are Francis B. Johnston and
Henry Bedford Lemere, who served as propagan-
dists of the Arts and Crafts movement. Both oper-
ated throughout the United Kingdom and had
well-known workshops in the vicinity of London.
Although there is no typical stylistic approach in
their work, it is clear that both leaned more toward
the clear and straightforward designs of Charles
Rennie Mackintosh than the wealth of detail char-
acteristic of the work of other designers and archi-
tects of the era. Instigated by books and reports on
English architecture, Italian, French, and German
photographers such as Mauricio Lotze, Michel
Neurdein, and Waldemar Titzenthaler began to
produce portfolios of interesting interiors andARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY