As many of you will be aware, among the myriad of things that regularly get our goat, architecture photography is right up there.
Architecture photography and the way the modern digital media fawningly reproduce every heavily photoshopped image that lands in their inboxes.
The camera does lie.
But then it always has, and as we noted in our post from the exhibition New Architecture! Modern Architecture in Images and Books at the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin, even in the days of analogue photography architectural photography was largely about presenting a controlled, stereotypical impression of buildings.
Not all architecture photographers however work to the architects brief. Or at least not all the time.
For the exhibition Constructing Worlds - Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age the Barbican Art Gallery have curated 250 photos from the past 80 years which the organisers claim go beyond a simple documentation of the built environment and rather explore the context in which buildings find themselves.
Featuring works by photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Lucien Hervé, Julius Shulman and Iwan Baan Constructing Worlds may not provide a warts and all exploration of architecture's social role and responsibility, but does promise to offer a view of architecture that goes beyond the sycophantic money shot tat we are all subjected to on a daily basis.
And that has to be welcomed.
Constructing Worlds - Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age runs at the Barbican Art Gallery, Silk St, London until Sunday January 11th
