The special exhibition "Building Representation: Photography and Architecture, Contemporary Interactions" will be on display at the Fogg Art Museum through April 11.

The exhibition will comprise selected works by contemporary artists who investigate the conceptual and technical foundation of photography in imagery depicting built environments. The artists represented -- Lorna Bieber, James Casebere, Stéphane Couturier, Abelardo Morell, Shellburne Thurber, and Hiroshi Sugimoto -- simultaneously explore the cultural meaning of the "architecture" of photographic syntax and present images of buildings as the public site of social critique or the hermetic location for the individual contemplation of the ritualized object. Their example stands for a broader trend among contemporary photographers to (re)present architecture as a location for cultural critique and meta-commentary. "Building Representation" is organized by Deborah Martin Kao, Charles C. Cunningham Sr. Associate Curator of Photographs, and Kenneth Martin Kao, lecturer in architecture, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. The exhibition is supported with funds from the John M. Rosenfield Teaching Exhibition Fund.

There will be 18 works in this small, focused installation. Each artist is represented with two to five photographs. Stéphane Couturier exploits the unique properties of large-format photography to compress architectural space. In his images that depict the archaeology of the urban condition, Couturier aims to create "objects of thought" that calculate the medium's dual capability to record artifacts and create artifice. Lorna Bieber, negotiating the slippage between the private and the public realm, chooses prosaic advertising photography from mass-audience magazines as her point of departure. Manipulating these pieces of consumer culture, Bieber invents disquieting photographic murals comprised of colliding environments that evoke film noir. For Shellburne Thurber, the province of domestic architecture -- the empty rooms in her late Aunt Anna's house -- becomes a site inhabited by memory. Her images contemplate the nearly ubiquitous implementation of photography as a memento mori within the culture.

These artists' explorations of the visual language of architecture also engage the history of photographic technology. The modern camera derives from the earlier camera obscura -- literally meaning a dark chamber -- a constructed space in which the outside world rendered itself in perspective automatically on a flat wall or plane through the natural magic of the optics of light. In his camera obscura photographs, Abelardo Morell transforms the familiar into the marvelous. Like Alice in Wonderland, the viewer of Morell's work contemplates a world turned inside out and upside down, where outside scenes inhabit private rooms. By photographing his own architectural models, James Casebere creates austere and ambiguous images that hover between the transcendent and the derelict, consciously evoking metaphors of the solitude of the artist's studio and the imagery of the camera obscura. In his theatre series Hiroshi Sugimoto sets his camera as if in the position of the film projector and makes an exposure for the length of the feature film. The cumulative effect of small quantities of light from the projector over a long duration reveals the ornate architecture and yet subverts the narrative of the film. In this manner, Sugimoto invokes the theater of photographic vision as his essential subject.