Industrial archeology and oral history both used
the camera to establish their methods hitherto seen
as irrelevant. Photographers such as Hilla and
Bernd Becher collected industrial construction
forms; Concept Art groups like the London-based
Art & Language (with Victor Burgin) or the Artist
Placement Group (with Stuart Brisley) began with
large collections of vernacular photography for
specific reasons grounded in local contexts but
with the space—and thus architecture—as constant
background. When in 1975 the European year of
building preservation was proclaimed, these initia-
tives were the first to gain political effort. But pre-
servation still is not always seen as positive by
governing forces; photographers such as Xujong,
who want to save Beijing’sHutongquarters from
being torn down, have to fight for decades with
their work. Travel photography has also gained
from the new interest in old buildings as can be
traced in the work of the Swiss photographers
Werner Studer and Emil Schulthess.
Urbanism is more than just old and new con-
structions along the roads and places of a given
city, it includes the spirit of an overall layout,
which was detected by a number of photographers
and artists in the 1960s. Art Sinsabaugh with his
large panoramas of motorway crossings and rail-
road junctions is an urbanist as well as other
panoramists: Eugene Omar Goldbeck, Joachim
Bonnemaison, and Josef Sudek. Ed Ruscha pro-
duced longleporellosof simple images taken along
roads like Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, which ins-
pired architectural theory like Venturi and Rauch’s
Learning from Las Vegasand influenced Pop Art
and Conceptual Art alike. Painters like Gerhard
Richter began to work from aerial views of city
centers by projecting these onto their canvasses.
Richard Hamilton and Sigmar Polke had bird’s
eye views of urban places enlarged to the visibility
of printing dots and transferred these images into
oil paintings or silk screen prints.
The staleness of architectural modernism only
was surpassed by the boredom of Architectural
Photography at the same time. Postmodernism
was on its way, and it would not have been possi-
ble without the influence of fashion and lifestyle
photography in the 1970s. Again, this influence
was made evident by the preservative character of
photography, and large collections of pictures
served as depositories for construction details
freshly combined by architectural double-coding
(Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture, London: Academy Editions [1977]).
Manfred Hamm was an important interpreter of
industrial heritage and dead technique. Reinhart
Wolf began to set New York’s skyscrapers’
heads, Georgia’s framework houses, Spanishcas-
tillos, and German as well as Japanese vernacular
architecture into scenes. Jean-Claude Gautrand
and the philosopher Paul Virilio strengthened
their interest in bunker archeology along the
French Atlantic coast. Gabriele Basilico went
along Mediterranean coasts for his series on Italian
and French harbors. Richard Pare collected court-
houses in the United States; Lewis Baltz recorded
industrial construction sites as well as parking lots
all over the world; and Stephen Shore concentrated
on road crossings.
Frank Gohlke, Joel Meyerowitz, and William
Eggleston reduced the concept of their collections
to the randomness of their appearance at a certain
place, a concept to be followed by a large number
of photographers in the early 1980s: Heinrich Rie-
besehl and Wilhelm Schu ̈rmann in Germany,
Manfred Willmann in Austria, Luigi Ghirri and
Giovanni Chiaramonte in Italy, Tony Ray-Jones
and Martin Parr in the United Kingdom, and Jay
Ullal in India. Postmodernism formed a full circle
when the Japanese photographer Yukio Futagawa
began to publish his magazineGlobal Architecture
concentrating on the heroic period of modern
architecture with the works of Frank Lloyd
Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier,
and others.
In the 1980s photography had become a fine art
in itself, established and regarded all over the
world. Bernd Becher was awarded an academy
professorship, and his Dusseldorf class seemed to
be the first one constituting Architectural Photo-
graphy as an important subclass of photographic
art. Although the first generation of his students—
Tata Ronkholz, Volker Do ̈hne—followed his ex-
ample of collecting vernacular or forgotten archi-
tectural specimen, the second generation began to
make Architectural Photography in itself a theme:
closure and distance were the categories to sub-
sume their art now. They form the most renowned
group of students from this class: Andreas Gursky,
Candida Ho ̈fer, Axel Hu ̈tte, Thomas Ruff (today
Becher’s successor on the seat), Thomas Struth,
and Petra Wunderlich. The third and last genera-
tion no longer regarded even these categories as
serious, and only a small number of them still
stuck to Architectural Photography: Laurenz Ber-
ges, Johannes Bruns, Elger Esser, Jongmyung Lee,
Heiner Schilling, and Josef Schulz.
Becher’s class had competition from the early
1980s onwards in a group of students forming
themselves under difficult conditions of the late-
communist Leipzig academy: Rudolf Scha ̈fer,ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY