Modernity Behind the Camera
Photography and Modern Architecture in Spain
Modern architecture was a handful of photos. For many Spanish architects of the postwar, it was sometimes a picture badly printed in a borrowed book, a snapshot taken while traveling with a friend, or, maybe with some luck, canonical images of Swiss publishers of architecture, in books obtained abroad. And maybe a couple of local magazines. Everything in black and white: modern architecture, like ancient Greek architecture, never came in colors. In the 1930s and 1950s, the four-color process was reserved for a few museum illustrations printed on art paper and glued to pages of cotton paper in the bulky volumes published in Zurich by Albert Skira. Our best architecture, too, was narrated in a black-and-white movie, and like our best cinema, was halfway between surreal and neorealist...
