Photographic Infrastructures: The Modern School and the Framing of American Architectural Photography

"Photographic Infrastructures: The Modern School and the Framing of American Architectural Photography" traces a global history of architectural photography and education between 1890 and 1950. It maps the movement of architectural, photographic, and pedagogical practices across US empire from its colonized periphery to its metropolitan center and rural fringe. The project draws on three novel photographic archives: surveys of infrastructure around the world made for school children, images of school buildings published in the architectural press, and pictures of learning environments featured in exhibitions meant to instruct the general public on the transformative potential of modern school design. It uncovers the social workings of photography by exposing the ways in which new approaches to teaching and learning in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century shaped the photographic representation of space and the built environment. "Photographic Infrastructures" argues that educational ideas were central to the making of architectural photography. The framing, circulation, and display of architectural photographs was tied to pedagogical practices and conceptions of the classroom.