Philippe Séclier - Atlas Tadao Ando

A few years ago, I had the chance to spend an afternoon inside Mario Ciampi’s 1970 Berkeley Art Museum – a Brutalist labyrinth of overlapping concrete galleries and walkways jutting out into the middle of an enormous central chamber. The building – damaged by earthquakes and already reinforced in numerous places with i-beams – had been emptied and was awaiting transformation into a bioresearch hub. Alone in this photographer’s paradise, the only camera I had with me was the one on my phone. It was liberating. Unencumbered by equipment, I was free to roam wherever I liked; I shot hundreds of photographs that afternoon.

Most of the time, however, architectural photography is treated as a slow business requiring specialist equipment – typically, a medium or large-format camera with tilt-shift capabilities that allow the photographer to control perspective. Since the early twentieth century, the relationship between photography and architecture has been a symbiotic one, with iconic buildings demanding equally iconic images. Contemporary architects are increasingly motivated to conceive of landmark projects along photographic lines – to imagine built space primarily as seen and only secondarily as experienced.

But the architectural photograph gives the building a kind of integrity that a visitor to the space can’t ever experience. In the introduction to his 1961 classic Photography and Architecture, British photographer Eric De Maré set out the limitations of photography in exactly the terms that I experienced them in Ciampi’s museum. ‘Photography can admirably express the external aspect of buildings’, he wrote, ‘but only by implication can it express the internal, or spatial, aspects. The camera can take in two enclosing walls, sometimes three …. [but] it cannot move its head around, nor walk about … it can never really get inside space so that you feel it all around you.’ Space changes as you move through it, in a way that the photograph struggles to express.

In principle, the camera phone is at odds with the aims of architectural photography – it struggles to produce a detailed, perspectivally accurate photograph of an entire building. What it does exceptionally well, however, is to deliver a quality specific to movement – the visual trace of the observer’s moment-by-moment encounter with a building, their shifting and always partial view.

Journalist and editor Philippe Séclier spent nine years crossing back and forth between Japan, Europe and North America in a bid to photograph more than 120 buildings by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Self-taught as an architect, Ando is a designer of minimalist raw concrete structures that combine a brutalist idiom with Shinto sensibilities. Atlas Tadao Ando comprises more than 2000 individual photographs of Ando’s works, all of them shot with Séclier’s phone camera. Each suite of images is accompanied by a short text describing his experience of the place.

In principle, the camera phone is at odds with the aims of architectural photography – it struggles to produce a detailed, perspectivally accurate photograph of an entire building. What it does exceptionally well, however, is to deliver a quality specific to movement – the visual trace of the observer’s moment-by-moment encounter with a building, their shifting and always partial view. Architect Jean Nouvel conceived of buildings in terms of sequential movement though space: ‘To erect a building is to predict and seek effects of contrast and linkage bound up with the succession of spaces through which one passes,’ he wrote. But this slow unfolding in time and space, as Atlas Tadao Ando so ably demonstrates, can never be fully controlled by the architect, and the book is a less a transcription of Ando’s intentions than a record of Séclier’s encounters with his work.

All of Séclier’s photographs are displayed in grids of multiple images, each reproduced at the same size as the phone’s screen. There’s no iconic view, no ‘best’ image singled out for enlargement.

The design of the volume is a testimony to the subjective nature of these encounters. All of Séclier’s photographs are displayed in grids of multiple images, each reproduced at the same size as the phone’s screen. There’s no iconic view, no ‘best’ image singled out for enlargement. Many of the grids function as compositions in and of themselves; it’s difficult – deliberately so, I think – to select a specific photograph on which to focus. Nor does the progression from one image to the next follow a logic that could be easily described as narrative or cinematic. Every image describes something slightly different: some show clearly the buildings’ outlines, but many of them are fragments, the product of sidelong glances.

It would be a mistake to refer to Séclier’s photographs as documents. They don’t include much information, nor are they meant to. Indeed, the page layouts encourage the viewer to experience individual photographs as parts of larger assemblages, each image acting in synergy with those around it. The photograph-as-document replicates the structural logic of the architect’s plan, mapping one kind of two-dimensional representation onto another, reducing three dimensions to two, and sidestepping the experience of built space. Séclier’s grids work against this logic, charting the photographer’s movement through space and creating a structural schema that is not just a transcription of the architect’s plan, but a more volumetric and performative record of the photographer’s encounter with space.

Seclier’s photographs could be enlarged, but that’s not the point. It’s not the building that’s setting the agenda here, nor the camera – Atlas Tadao Ando is very much about the unique relationship between an individual and architectural space. Séclier’s photographic style, his movement, where his eye tends to settle, is as much the subject of this book as Ando’s buildings. I love looking through Atlas Tadao Ando, and I love what it suggests: that architectural photography is the genre where the camera’s ability to really capture space encounters its most spectacular failure.