The Life and Death of Buildings On Photography and Time Joel Smith

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, indirectly marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11, explores the intersection between these two ways of embodying the past, by contemplating photographs of buildings as simultaneously the agents, vehicles, and cargo of social memory. "The Life and Death of Buildings" features images by such renowned photographers as Edouard-Denis Baldus, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laura Gilpin, Lewis W. Hine, and William Henry Fox Talbot alongside those by amateurs, architects, propagandists, and even insurance adjusters. Rather than examine these photographers' aims in isolation, the author considers how their images reflect and inflect the passage of time. Much as a building's shifting function and circumstances substantially alter its significance, a photograph studied in the context of its subsequent history grows layers of meaning to which its maker had no access.

Joel Smith is curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum. His previous publications include Edward Steichen: The Early Years.

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