other series for the illustrated papers; some of them
cooperated with well known architects by provid-
ing them not only with pictures of their edifices but
with historical material as well. Similar to the work
of their English counterparts, the presentation of
architecture by these early twentieth century figures
was meant to educate and refine the sensibilities of
the increasing number of wealthy clients who had
made their fortune in the late nineteenth century.
In the years shortly before World War I, mod-
ernism made its way to the public via Architectural
Photography. European architects such as Le Cor-
busier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe had begun their careers at offices like those of
Peter Behrens and Theodor Fischer, which featured
large archives of photographic material from all
kinds of sources. When Le Corbusier traveled to
Greece and Italy he took photographs to aid his
memory, but when he published his research in
several magazine articles and books—thus found-
ing avant-garde architecture—he used existing pic-
tures by photographers such as Fred Boissonas,
Arthur Koester, and Hugo Schmoelz. On the
other hand, the American architect Frank Lloyd
Wright began a close collaboration with the photo-
grapher Clarence Fuermann.
In the area of industrial use of Architectural
Photography, the Deutsche Werkbund, a congrega-
tion of industrialists, architects, designers, artists,
and craftsmen founded in 1907, set the parameters
for modern object photography by producing cata-
logues of well-designed pieces shown on white back-
grounds under diffuse light—a method of display
used throughout the twentieth century. The years
following World War I saw the beginnings of so-
called straight photography as a fine art, with Archi-
tectural Photography playing a large role in this
development, along with the conventions that arose
around object photography in commercial and
industrial applications. Although some American
and European fine arts photographers, including
Frederick Henry Evans, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward
Steichen, and Hugo Henneberg, had used architec-
ture as motifs in their compositions, Architectural
Photography was not an important theme in this
movement. The careers of Charles Sheeler and
Paul Strand, however, placed Architectural Photo-
graphy front and center in American fine arts
photography. Their reference medium was the doc-
umentary film, and after finishing their movie
about New York in 1921 architecture became their
metaphor for both old and modern as well as rural
versus urban life: Sheeler’s series on Shaker villages
as well as Strand’s still lifes of metal objects were
executed in technically perfect prints and shown as
if they were commercial Architectural Photogra-
phy, elevating it to a fine art.
Different sources in Europe gave birth to similar
results. The German Neue Schlichkeit (New Objec-
tivity) was a painting movement emphasizing motifs
that had been previously explored in Architectural
Photography, and it returned to fine art photogra-
phy again in the works of Albert Renger-Patzsch,
August Sander, and their successors. In France,
film had early on acquired the status of a fine art
and the realism of French film, as in the work of the
directorRene ́Clair,infusedArchitecturalPhotogra-
phy into the modern consciousness in its use of set-
tings. The photographer Claude Gravot had his
roots in this cross-fertilization; he had worked for
Le Corbusier and Robert Mallet-Stevens, the most
renowned French film architect in the 1930s. In Bel-
gium, documentary filmmakers such as Joris Ivens
provided inspiration for the photography of Willy
Kessels and Camille Petry. Only the United King-
dom seemed content with the aesthetic promulgated
by the Arts-and-Crafts movement and its influence
on the Linked Ring Brotherhood. Frederick Henry
Evans, who had done most of his architectural sub-
jects between 1890 and 1910 in England and France,
found his successors in Bill C. Clayton, and later in
Anthony Ayscough and Edwin Smith. Modernism
in British Architectural Photography lies chiefly on
the shoulders of Herbert Felton whose immense
oeuvre is now one of the main sources of material
on 1930s’ design.
In the 1930s, Modernism continued to spread
throughout the world, Architectural Photography
being an important means of dissemination of the
ideas of the modern architects who used the cam-
era both for the preparation and the distribution of
their work. Architectural Photography received a
new quality in the work of Erich Mendelsohn,
renowned modernist architect in 1920s Berlin who
emigrated in 1933, arriving in San Francisco after
a decade in Israel. Mendelsohn had cooperated
with photographers like Arthur and Walter Koe-
ster but was driven to a collection of photographs
showing American grain elevators and industrial
sites that were presented by Walter Gropius at an
exhibition of the Deutsche Werkbund in 1914. In
1924 he received the commission from one of his
clients to photograph and describe modern Amer-
ican architecture and traveled to the United States.
The photographs he brought back to Germany
were not only interesting in their choice of subjects
but as stylistic approaches as well. They subse-
quently caused a fashion of Americanism in Europ-
ean Architectural Photography strictly connected
to Modernism.ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY