EditoriaL | About the 4th number of Sophia,
Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness
of Urban Space through Photography and Image

by Iñaki Bergera

If we take for granted the idea of being in the so-called post-photographic era, the genre that can surely suffer its consequences and show its manifestations is that of architectural photography. Architectural photography no longer documents given that the veracity … Read more

About the 5th International Conference On the Surface

by Pedro Gadanho and Pedro Leão Neto

The 5th International Conference On the Surface: Photography on Architecture - Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image, which took place on the 31st of May 2019 on occasion of MAAT’s Fiction and Fabrication exhibition offered a forum for an interdisciplinary … Read more

HC (hortus conclusus)

by Beate Gütschow

HC stands for hortus conclusus, a Latin term that means “enclosed garden”. In the HC series, the principles of medieval art with regard to pictorial space and perspective are applied to photography. In the Middle Ages, many images were rendered in parallel perspective; the viewpoint is always elevated. I have employed these spatial representations in my … Read more

Contemporary discOurses on Architecture,
City and Territory: Visual Spaces of Change

by Pedro Leão Neto

One of the main interests of this panel was to explore the relationships between virtual dimensions of photography and concrete physical realities in contemporary discourses on Architecture, City and Territory. We wanted to discuss, among other things, how constructed and manipulated images that suggest a new reading … Read more

Visually reinventing architecture
in the pre-cinematic scenario of Idris Khan’s photographs

by Katarina Andjelkovic

With consideration for the potential of digital technology to surpass the binarities of what is “alive” in form and “non-living” in life, this essay proposes that Idris Khan”s production of photographs contribute to reveal animate form as a critical philosophical issue in human perception, and in the same time as a fundamental manipulative agent of cinema’s very own … Read more

Photocreation as a propeller to upcoming
new urban and spatial utopias

by Klauss Borges

Taking a look at architectural history it is possible to realise that the most effervescent and developing periods of the discipline are mostly the ones in which architecture had opened itself to deal and think through the transformations society had to face and which by consequence, not always have been limited … Read more

Ringroad (Houston), 2005: The Construction of an Image

by Bas Princen

A few days after hurricane Rita in 2005, I drove east of Houston, anxious to see the effects of this force of nature on the landscape through which we had travelled a few months earlier. I imagined emptiness, void and ruin, but the fragility of the landscape was only exposed by the debris of human interventions … Read more

Re-framing the Public Space:
Relations between Architecture and Photography

by Iñaki Bergera

As stated in the Call for Papers of this second panel of the conference, the session sought to fully tackle the core of the relationship between architecture and photography in its irrefutable urban context. The general approach to confront these thoughts would surely have to do with the perceptive and the phenomenological … Read more

ClareirA: Towards a phenomenological perspective
in the representation of architectural space

by Ana Miriam, Fátima Pombo, José Carneiro

This paper presents a photography based research on the representation of architectural space, taking Trindade subway station, in the city of Porto, as a case study. Taking a phenomenological perspective, its main objective was to investigate and experiment on photography’s possibilities, as a tool to approach and communicate … Read more

A Bridge

by Sebastiano Raimondo

A Bridge continues my research initiated in 2007 when my photography studies at the Palermo University began.
On the first project concluded in 2009, shortly after being transferred to Lisbon and beginning to work on the project
which I named A Bridge, I faced photography as a window through which to look at the world … Read more

Behavioral mapping of Abu Dhabi’s public spaces:
Urban research photography and cultural clashes

by Apostolos Kyriazis, Ayesha Zahid, Clemence Montagne, Clio Chaveneau, Hadrien Dubucs, Hanu Dilip, Shafaq Qamar

Abu Dhabi is arguably the exemplar of new cities in the Gulf region, meeting unprecedented urban growth – as fueled by the oil boom – that transformed it from a seasonal fishing post to a contemporary global hub. Its five decades of history, although shallow compared to other cities, were enough for the city … Read more

Atlas Interactive.
Visual register of urban architecture in Latin America.
A work in progress.

by Cristina Gastón Guirao

In the beginning of the 21st century, the technology that provides access to digital maps allowing them to be associated
with all types of data, has opened up innumerable possibilities, contributing a new reference framework to architectural
culture. Maps have to do with the way we represent ourselves in space and orient us in … Read more

Image-Making After PhotoshoP:
Architecture, Public Space and their Visual Discontents

by Pedro Gadanho

Nowadays, I like to refer to “photography of architecture” rather than to “architectural photography.” This is intentional.
Within the notion of architectural photography is the sense of a practice of image-making that gravitates exclusively
around the field of architecture—thus relating to the stricter aims and legitimation criteria of that discipline … Read more

The invisible villages.
Up-to-date Images of Settlement in SpaiN

by Ana Amado, Andrés Patiño

Photography has played an instrumental role in the creation of icons and the dissemination of architecture since the very
onset of the Modern Movement. The appearance of the professional architectural photographer and some providential architect/photographer pairings would be key to the massive diffusion of the International Style … Read more

Peter Scheier and Marcel Gautherot:
Brasília Lyric and Epic

by Mariana W. von Hartenthal

Dedicated on April 21, 1960, Brasília was built from scratch in three and a half years. The rare occasion attracted the attention of numerous photographers, among them Peter Scheier (1908-1979), a German Jew who fled the Nazis and settled in Brazil in 1937. is paper examines how Scheier’s documentation deviates … Read more

Visual technological enthusiasm: an industrial urban spectacle in the “Tenth Anniversary” commemorative albums of China

by Haode Sun

“Smokestacks everywhere from the view of Tiananmen Gate Tower” – the notable statement vividly demonstrated the ambition of industrial development for modernization by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1950, which was also shared by Mao’s predecessor,
Dr. Sun Yat-sen, in his plan for a modern … Read more

Photography on Architecture - Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Transformation of Publicness

by Paolo Rosselli

In a conference dedicated to photography and architecture it is logical that the photographer expounds his point of view. Just as historians, critics and curators do. Sometimes one feels the lack of other figures such as the collector and the gallery owner, that is to say the representatives of the so-called photography market, an area that … Read more