Analogue Images in Review

With over forty photos of their architectural commissions, the editors share, “Analogue Images is both an attempt at a critical analysis of their work and a collection of some of the architecture we like.” Alongside the images, a series of essays explore a myriad of ideas that frame the reading of the photographs—as architectural photography that comments on society, the increasing use of an overly digital world, the role of an image, and, at its heart, what constitutes a ‘good’ photograph.

A reflective place to start to understand the vision of the two photographers, and by association, the book, is in Matthew Blunderfield’s essay, Analogue Visions. Here, he considers the engagement and popularity of Gardiner and Delvaux’s works. Musing on news feeds and “scrolling [becoming] its own form of lived experience,” he argues that the photographers’ practices (and commitment to film) offer an antidote and statement of resistance to the overly stylised images we are exposed to. There is a changing perspective reflected throughout the industry with architects around the world drawn to the two photographers and their use of analogue film. It’s something Bludefielo puts down to “the art of looking.” A fantasy of analogue and a yearning for originality and the avant-garde.

Architect Louise Wright, who has worked closely with Gardiner, writes in her essay Untitled, “To allow the photograph to capture a moment of occupation, and deviate from the documentation of the object or clarity of a framed view (as well as the architect’s understanding of the building) is to see the photographs as unofficial rather than artefacts.” She reveals that through this methodology, the image is released from the historical context. Wright questions how the image can instead become the discourse. There is a line in Wright’s essay about the in-between spaces of architecture, where she offers Gardiner artistic control over the images. He makes the case for an image without any architecture. “It shows the space between buildings; it’s full of openness… now the tension of looseness, of gaps, is apparent to me. That loose space is important to the sense of place.”

The book starts with the photographers' journeys from Sydney airport to the city’s western suburbs. In the introduction, Max and Rory do Fairfield West: An Experiment, Guillermo Fernández-Abascal and Urtzi Grau recall saying, “Let us drive you to a random location in Sydney that we believe relates to your practice and show us how you work.” This was the first time Gardiner and Delvaux met in person, armed with their almost identical large-format Arca-Swiss cameras. An exploration through the urban landscape homogenised the power of suburban fabric.

In the photographers’ final images (pages 56 and 57), the reader can identify the banal and everyday motifs of powerlines, streetlights, garbage bins, palm trees, Colourbond fences, and utes at play. Each is a signifier of Australian suburbia. With a distinct use of greys and a sense of eeriness, the photographs are the results of very carefully considered framing. The slowness of the photography and heavy, physical manoeuvring of the large-format monorail camera film force the photographer to slow down and shoot. As part of Analogue Images, the photographers handed over their final image to the other for an edit for a collaborative piece. In so doing, they blur the line between author and viewer.

“When set free from the architects’ control, photography has the power to rewire the aesthetic codes and liberate architecture from its disciplinary straitjacket,” Carlo Menon writes in his essay Glitch the control freak. By offering control elsewhere, Menon shares, the image is able “to subvert the status and codes of representation of the objects it portrays.” It’s here that Analogue Images challenges the norms of architectural photography to provide something other than a documentation of architecture. A handover of control. For one, the focus is the slow-moving analogue over digital photography. The other taps into a sense of voyeurism, and yet, figures become props, and architecture is the framing for the beyond. As Fernández-Abascal and Grau share, “the stuff surrounding the architecture,” where the architecture disappears into the surrounding vernacular or landscape.

The editors share Gardiner and Delvaux’s photographic practices, which “remind [them] that good architectural photography is rarely just a professional commission, but an agreement on how to look at things together.” They depict a reference to time and place, a ‘nostalgia for belonging,’, searching for commonality and being grounded in place. One that, Jesús Vasallo observes, “Photography has the power to establish an emotional connection between us and our environment.”

Analogue Images takes an interest in the banal and the intrigue within for an aesthetic response. A rejection of typical architectural imagery and the glossy magazines that publish them before being reproduced for the oversaturation of Instagram. There is little political discussion about the people living in the houses or how their society looks. Why is the mundane streetscape the focus, or why is forgotten architecture left to crumble in a worldwide housing and climate crisis? Analogue Images doesn’t offer these solutions in architecture, but it does offer a juxtaposition to an industry that works off the back of an ever-new, shiny object. Maybe it’s a start for rethinking and reimagining what the architectural industry could look like.

Analogue Images, Rory Gardiner, Maxime Delvaux
Editors: Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, Urtzi Grau, and Janelle Woo.
Contributors: Matthew Blunderfield, Carlo Menon, Anna Tonkin, Jesús Vassallo, and Louise Wright
Designer: Samson Ossedryver
Publisher: Perimeter Editions