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Contemporary vision: photography's influence on perception of places and the past

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Contemporary vision: photography's influence on perception of places and the past

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Content CONTEMPORARY VISION:
PHOTOGRAPHY’S INFLUENCE ON PERCEPTION
OF PLACES AND THE PAST
by
Samantha Angela Malnati
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF HERITAGE CONSERVATION
May 2025
Copyright 2025 Samantha Angela Malnati

ii
“Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium….
And contemporary vision, the new life, is based on honest approach to all problems,
be they morals or art.”
– Edward Weston

iii
Dedication
To every professional, amateur, and casual photographer who has shared their thoughts and
expertise with me over the past two years - I have enjoyed seeing the world a little differently.
The increasingly aggressive onslaught of our digital age is a conflicting source of anxiety and
excitement for many. Yet above all, to borrow the words of Charles Peterson, it has been “… a fine
time to be alive and learning.”1
1 Charles Peterson, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites (Library of Congress, 1983), 9.

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Acknowledgments
Thank you to Josh and my parents - for my eyes, my early cameras, and your constant support.
Without the generosity of every art teacher, architecture professor, librarian, archivist, facilities
worker, and friend throughout my education I would not have learned to see beyond what my eyes
assume. My success in graduate school is specifically thanks to the unending patience and guidance
of Trudi Sandmeier, Cindy Olnick, Alan White, David Sloane, and the Gamble House Conservancy
staff; among many other caring professors and practitioners who have inspired me in ways I could
never have anticipated. In particular, I owe immense gratitude to Katie Horak, Erik Carver, and Jay
Platt for seeing what I intended by this thesis and their tireless efforts to help me get it there.
Among the many practitioners of the field to whom I am grateful, I must particularly recognize the
generosity and wisdom of Ryan Brubacher and Kit Arrington at the Library of Congress; Jarob
Ortiz, Scott Keyes, Mary McPartland, and John Burns at Heritage Documentation Programs; and
Simeon Warren and Mary Bindas at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.
Thank you most of all to Schaf - without whose encouragement, patience, resources, and passion
none of this would have been possible.

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Table of Contents
Epigraph ................................................................................................................................................................ii
Dedication............................................................................................................................................................iii
Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................................................iv
List of Figures......................................................................................................................................................vi
List of Acronyms.................................................................................................................................................ix
Abstract..................................................................................................................................................................x
Introduction..........................................................................................................................................................1
Chapter One: Evolution of Architectural Photography................................................................................7
INTERPRETATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE ...........................................................................................7
DEVELOPMENT OF ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY......................................................15
Chapter Two: Architectural Photography As Documentation ..................................................................34
INTERPRETATIONS OF VISION........................................................................................................34
DEVELOPMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHIC OPERATION...............................................................44
TOOLS FOR PHOTOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................50
Chapter Three: Case Study – Fotomat Kiosk in Glendale, California......................................................62
Chapter Four: Photography and Preservation ..............................................................................................80
INTERPRETATION OF ARCHITECTURAL DOCUMENTATION..........................................80
DEVELOPMENT OF DOCUMENTATION PRACTICE...............................................................88
TOOLS FOR DIGITAL IMAGE PRESERVATION .........................................................................99
Chapter Five: Photography for the Heritage Documentation Programs...............................................105
ORIGINS OF THE PROGRAM............................................................................................................105
DEVELOPMENT OF ACCESSIBILITY.............................................................................................118
INTERPRETATION OF HDP PHOTOGRAPHS ...........................................................................123
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................................138
INTERPRETATION OF PLACES AND THE PAST......................................................................138
FUTURE OF HDP PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION ....................................................142
Bibliography......................................................................................................................................................150
Appendices........................................................................................................................................................161
1) SPECIFICATIONS FOR THE MEASUREMENT AND RECORDING OF HISTORIC
AMERICAN BUILDINGS AND STRUCTURAL REMAINS........................................................161
2) FEDERAL REGISTER (VOL. 48, NO. 190), 1983. ......................................................................169
3) FEDERAL REGISTER (VOL. 68, NO. 139), 2003. ......................................................................174

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List of Figures
Figure 1.1: Gamble House north and west façades, view southeast ........................................................ 1
Figure 1.2: Westmoreland Place and Gamble House east façade, view northwest ............................... 2
Figure 2.1: “View from the Window at Le Gras” ..................................................................................... 17
Figure 2.2: “Latticed Window (with the Camera Obscura)” ................................................................... 18
Figure 2.3: “Boulevard du Temple” ............................................................................................................ 19
Figure 2.4: “Western Approach to the Acropolis, Athens” .................................................................... 21
Figure 2.5: “The Flatiron” ............................................................................................................................ 23
Figure 2.6: “Wheat Silos and Elevators in Canada” ................................................................................. 26
Figure 2.7: “Wheat Silo in Buenos Aires” .................................................................................................. 27
Figure 2.8: “Macdougal Alley (From MacDougal Street between West 8th Street and
Washington Square North)” ........................................................................................................... 29
Figure 2.9: “Exterior Top Story Detail - Schiller Building, 64 West Randolph Street,
Chicago, Cook County, IL” ............................................................................................................. 32
Figure 3.1: Kodak advertisement from Life magazine .............................................................................. 41
Figure 3.2: First published illustration of camera obscura in Gemma Frisius’s book
De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica .................................................................................................... 46
Figure 3.3: National Geographic cover featuring a digitally manipulated image of the
Pyramids of Giza by photographer Gordon Gahan ................................................................... 47
Figure 4.1: Jun 25, 1971 Life magazine Fotomat advertisement ............................................................ 63
Figure 4.2: Cambo SC 5" x 7" ...................................................................................................................... 65
Figure 4.3: Orthogonal view of southwest façade, camera height 5′, facing northeast.
Fotomat booth, 246 North Glendale Avenue, Glendale, CA ................................................... 66

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Figure 4.4: PhaseOne IQ4 ............................................................................................................................. 67
Figure 4.5: Orthogonal view of southwest façade taken with PhaseOne IQ4 ...................................... 68
Figure 4.6: PhaseOne XT IQ4 (left) next to Canon EOS R5 (right) ..................................................... 70
Figure 4.7: Orthogonal view of southwest façade shot with Canon R5 ................................................ 71
Figure 4.8: Orthogonal view of southwest façade shot with Google Pixel 7a ...................................... 72
Figure 4.9: Image quality comparison .......................................................................................................... 74
Figure 4.10: Perspective comparison ........................................................................................................... 76
Figure 4.11: Hastily shot view of southwest façade .................................................................................. 77
Figure 4.12: Retroactive in-phone edit of hasty view of southwest façade ........................................... 78
Figure 5.1: “East elevation, from 450' to apex. - Washington Monument, High ground
West of Fifteenth Street, Northwest, between Independence & Constitution Avenues,
Washington, District of Columbia, DC” ....................................................................................... 84
Figure 5.2: “Detail, corroded stairs on stoves to central furnaces. - Central Furnaces,
2650 Broadway, east bank of Cuyahoga River, Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, OH” ............ 86
Figure 5.3: “View southeast: brass window handle - Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers
Building, 1365 Ontario Street, Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, OH” ........................................ 88
Figure 6.1: “South West Elevation - James Kavanagh House, 35 Pond Road,
Damariscotta Mills, Lincoln County, ME” ................................................................................ 111
Figure 6.2: “Detail of Southwest Entrance (Front) - Walpole Meeting House,
State Route 129, Walpole, Lincoln County, ME” ..................................................................... 112
Figure 6.3: “DOOR KNOB WITH CITY SEAL - Kingston City Hall, 408 Broadway,
Kingston, Ulster County, NY” .................................................................................................... 125
Figure 6.4: “Spiral stairway. - Captain Charles L. Shrewsbury House, 301 West First Street
(High & Poplar Streets), Madison, Jefferson County, IN” ..................................................... 127

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Figure 6.5: “Detail of spiral stairway - Captain Charles L. Shrewsbury House, 301
West First Street (High & Poplar Streets), Madison, Jefferson County, IN” ...................... 128
Figure 6.6: “FRONT ELEVATION DETAIL Seen from West – La Rionda Cottage,
1218-1220 Burgundy Street, New Orleans, Orleans Parish, LA, 1938” ............................... 130
Figure 6.7: “Quite Possibly a Retired Bottler and His Dog Spot in Foreground –
Germania Brewery, Front & Gordon Streets, Allentown, Lehigh County, PA” ................. 132
Figure 6.8: “Blacksmith Keyser At Forge, With Sparks. – Keyser Brothers Iron Works,
4041 Ridge Avenue, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, PA, November 1971” ................. 133
Figure 6.9: “During Demolition, Showing House Splitting in Half - Ulysses S. Grant Cottage,
995 Ocean Avenue, Long Branch, Monmouth County, NJ” ................................................. 136

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List of Acronyms
HABS - Historic American Buildings Survey
HAER - Historic American Engineering Record
HALS - Historic American Landscapes Survey
HDP - Heritage Documentation Programs
LOC - Library of Congress
P&P - Prints and Photographs Division
PPOC - Prints and Photographs Online Catalog
NPS - National Park Service
NCPTT - National Center for Preservation Technology and Training
AIA - American Institute of Architects
ASLA - American Society of Landscape Architects
MVLA - Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association
CWA - Civil Works Administration
WPA - Works Progress Administration
FAP - Federal Art Project
NHPA - National Historic Preservation Act
NRHP - National Register of Historic Places
HCRS - Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service
NAER - National Architectural and Engineering Record
NDLP - National Digital Library Program
NDIIPP - National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

x
Abstract
Since its introduction to the public in 1839, photography has radically changed cultural
perceptions of vision, time, history, objectivity, and the ways these concepts relate to the built
environment. Today photography is so prolific and accessible that it is difficult to escape the
influence of such imagery on our ability to interpret the world around us. The development and
evolution of digital media in recent decades have brought questions of visual reliability to the
forefront of debate over photographic capture and use. Digital imagery’s ease of manipulation,
potential for artificial generation, and questionable archival longevity appear to distinguish pixelbased images from their analog film predecessors when considering their use as documentary
records.
For architectural appreciation, study, and recordation, the value of photographic
documentation depends on its authenticity and public accessibility. The nature of digital media’s
questionable level of human interference and unstable archival preservation appear to threaten the
success of architectural documentation photography in the contemporary era. However, upon
careful examination of historically evolving notions of objectivity and permanency, the ability of
digital media to similarly adhere to qualities of analog documentation becomes evident. Regardless
of format, maintaining a commitment to the best attempt at reliability and accessibility can help
ensure that architectural photographic documentation can successfully convey the intended cultural
significance of a given site for future generations.

1
Introduction
“Documentary photography is a personal matter.”
- Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (1949)
In 2016 I sat in a darkened lecture hall and watched a sequence of images of places I had
never visited flash across a large screen, an experience shared by thousands of other architecture
students over the course of the discipline’s teaching. In his description of American architectural
history, my professor pointed out key features of one notable house in particular: large overhanging
eaves, redwood shakes, sizable porches. The images depicted a house two thousand miles away that
I could imagine and admire, but not envision experiencing firsthand. Eight years later I was
fortunate to be selected as a Scholar-in-Residence at this very house: a 1908 Craftsman masterpiece
designed by Charles and Henry Greene. The Gamble House looks different in person.
Figure 1. 1: Alexander Vertikoff, The Gamble House (north and west façades, view southeast), 2023, © The Gamble
House Conservancy, gamblehouse.org.
My own image of the Gamble House provides a very different view of an abundantly
photographed building. Framed slightly tilted and off-center with my Subaru in prominent display,
its visage reflects my individual decisions over its presentation and what I deemed valuable to

2
include. (Figure 1.2) Despite its personal value, this photograph has a number of flaws that render it
ineffective as a tool to adequately study the building. My backlit smartphone image alters the house’s
color and loses quality when enhanced to view minuscule details. My composition obscures key
elements such as the depth of the second-story sleeping porch or the characteristic clinker bricks of
the rear terrace. The image speaks more to my attachment to my car than to the Gamble House’s
immense architectural, historic, and cultural value. To a casual observer, the image I first saw in that
architecture lecture hall in 2016 could depict an entirely different house. (Figure 1.1)
Figure 1. 2: Westmoreland Place and Gamble House east façade, view northwest. August 22, 2024. Photo by author.
As a resident, I consider the Gamble House nearly unrecognizable from the image I formed
of it in my mind back in 2016 - but not because I see it as a home. When I look at the house in
person, I see only a landmark framed by its many visitors’ lenses. Every day I walk down the front
path past clusters of tourists capturing their own versions of the picture I initially studied in that

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darkened lecture hall. Each new image reaffirms the Gamble House as not just a landmark but a
collective perception. They are taking pictures of taking pictures. 2
The near-constant stream of tourists taking photographs of the Gamble House slightly
bothered me at first. What more could there be to capture about this house, deliberately stewarded
in a way which ensures it does not drastically change? A quick internet search for images of the
house returns thousands of seemingly similar pictures. In a world flooded with photographs, such
architectural photography has “not only inventoried heritage efficiently but also helped shape public
perception, concentrating attention on, and therefore changing the cultural value of, a select group
of buildings and objects.”3 Located in a neighborhood populated by similarly extravagant homes
(including some others designed by architects Greene and Greene), the hundreds of tourists who
specifically visit the Gamble House each day to capture their own vantage of the building are
informed by the elevated perception of the house that prior photographic depictions encourage.
Running late for work or school, it quickly became easy to rush past the ornate wood
detailing or shimmering art glass and I would briefly forget I was residing in an architectural
masterpiece. I saw the house either as an image of an image or I did not see the house at all, until I
turned my own camera’s lens to it. Photography, despite its hand in morphing my perception of the
building, acted as a powerful tool in recognizing what had become easy to overlook about my
surroundings. Contemporary architectural photographer Hélène Binet affirms that “taking a
photograph is an opportunity to rediscover something, to see something that most of the time you
don’t see – because you think you already know it, or you have never taken the time to look at it.”
4
Renowned for her work in large format film photography, Binet’s practice in particular demands a
2 Don DeLillo, White Noise (Penguin, 1999), 12.
3 Iñaki Bergera and Jorge Otero-Pailos. “Editors’ Introduction: Photography and Preservation” (2013), v.
4 Rupert Bickersteth, “Most Contemporary Architecture Photography ‘Looks the Same’ says Hélène Binet” (2024).

4
lengthy relationship with a building. A more complex process than an instantaneous snapshot
captured by smartphone camera, the nature of large format photography depends on careful analysis
and consideration of how best to represent a scene using the complex mechanics and finite
resources of sheet film.
Inundated by images due to the comparable ease of photography in the contemporary digital
age, the prevalence of people capturing the same view of the same house supports photographer
Joan Fontcuberta’s assertion of an “exhaustion of the image [which] details the threat – or
realization – of a self-imposed absorption: a saturating mechanism of elimination in the name of
accumulation where a contagious disregard for accountability is perpetuated.”
5 The ubiquity of
contemporary digital processes, computer generated images, or those made by artificial intelligence
threaten to obscure the benefits of crafted narrative inherent in the work of skilled analog
photographers like Binet. A modern viewer’s easily accessible relationship with digital imaging
accentuates such media’s perceived value and reliability, compared to those of early viewers of
photography.
The digital era has created novel ways of capturing, interpreting, and disseminating images.
Questions of objectivity, cultural value, and knowledge potential that are raised by the use of digital
images reflect similar questions that followed the initial introduction of photography to the public in
1839. In its continual reframing of the value of visual media, architect William J. Mitchell suggests
that the “emergence of digital imaging [is] a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in
photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic
objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition.”
6
The ability of every passerby to capture their own image of the Gamble House which initially
5 Camila Moreiras, “Joan Fontcuberta: Post-Photography and the Spectral Image of Saturation” (2017), 59.
6 William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (MIT Press, 1994), 8.

5
confounded me, in fact represents a sense of freedom photography offers in its ability to depict each
visitor’s unique experience.
Because the contemporary digital age allows most people with access to a smartphone to act
as both producers and consumers of photography, recognition of visual media’s effect over our
perception of history and the built environment is often not wholly considered when interpreting
our relationship to the historic built environment and its cultural value. To expand upon scholar
Laurajane Smith’s claim that “Heritage is, in a sense, a gaze or way of seeing,” the value that is
ascribed to visual media supplies an equally influential gaze in itself.
7 Architectural photography
exhibits a unique ability to manipulate which elements of the built environment are viewed as
valuable, an identification significant both in our appreciation of architecture and in our
interpretation of history. This highly persuasive role prescribes a necessity that such images adhere
as closely to an accurate depiction of their subjects as possible. Yet a commitment to accuracy is
complicated by the infinite mutability of digital images afforded by post-processing software,
coupled with the complex nature of photographic representation embedded within the nature and
origins of the medium itself.
This thesis explores the evolution of architectural photography and its relation to objectivity
over time, attempts at attaining reliable and durable documentation, and considerations for what the
future of photographic technology will imply for the success and perception of architectural
documentation. Beginning with a reflection on the development of historicism and the notion of
objectivity in relation to the nineteenth century’s early photographic endeavors, chapter one details
the application of such concepts to the evolution of the field of architectural photography. Chapter
two describes the ways that artistic precepts and the mechanics of the camera influence the use of
such architectural images on the perception and study of architecture. Chapter three provides a case
7 Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (Routledge, 2006), 52.

6
study analysis comparing the visual differences between analog and digital documentation of a
Fotomat Kiosk in Glendale, California. Expanding on the established use of architectural
photography, chapter four examines the relationship between photography and the field of historic
preservation, including consideration for the preservation of photographic materials themselves.
Amidst the abundance of documentary photographic endeavors described, chapter five provides
deeper analysis into the role of photography within the National Park Service’s Heritage
Documentation Programs (NPS)(HDP), considering the program’s commitment to historic
authenticity and longevity in relation to evolving photographic practices.

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Chapter One: Evolution of Architectural Photography
“To the traveller in distant lands, who is ignorant as too many unfortunately are,
of the art of drawing, this little invention may prove of real service.”
- William Henry Fox Talbot, Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing (1843)
INTERPRETATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE
Emerging in the nineteenth century - an era of deliberate consideration about how historical
concepts were determined and conveyed - the nascent photograph held significant cultural weight in
altering the Western sense of time and the past. Before the invention of a means for fixing the
photographic image, the only methods of documenting the visual world were dexterously performed
by painters, drawers, and printmakers. As interpretations of cultural knowledge progressed
throughout history, the increased ease of visual imagery’s production and dissemination became
“closely connected with the rise of sight as the sense for knowing the world. In contrast to the
supposedly messier, more subjective senses, such as touch and smell, sight was increasingly
associated with objectivity, rationality, and (human) knowledge throughout the nineteenth century.”8
The ability to secure an image with chemicals or pixels rather than the human hand reflects an
unprecedented change to our relationship with visual media. Through this new mechanical process,
the concept of objectivity became tied to questions of accuracy and morality, offering a promise of
the natural world untouched by human intervention.
While historicism saw significant development in Europe throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries with the rise of empirical science and German romanticism, these early
concepts of history privileged immutable natural law to which all human nature was assumed to
abide. Historicist thinkers soon came to believe, however, that “Human reason was not a faithful
8 Katharina Fackler, “Of Stereoscopes and Instagram: Materiality, Affect, and the Senses from Analog to Digital
Photography” (2019), 520.

8
reflection of abstract truths; it was the rationalization of social customs and institutions, which had
evolved slowly and which varied from place to place and from one time to another.”9 While
consideration for the past had informed many earlier movements, such as the Renaissance of the
fourteenth century, the conceptual divorce from natural law marked eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury historicists with a unique sense of nostalgia and a self-awareness of one’s place within time.
This understanding of historiography that prioritized an individual interpretation of history,
one that is unique to each culture and susceptible to distinct paths of development, became similarly
reflected in the use and understanding of visual representation. Professor of Film and Media Mary
Ann Doane notes the significance of the link between photographic depiction and recognition of
historicism in asserting that “at the turn of the century time became palpable in a quite different way
- one specific to modernity and intimately allied with its new technologies of representation
(photography, film, phonography).” The burden of visual truth that was ascribed to photography at
its inception acted as a means of freezing a sliver of history in a way no invention had been able to
achieve before. Doane notes that as a result of this apparent ability to visually embalm reality, “time
was indeed felt—as a weight, as a source of anxiety, and as an acutely pressing problem of
representation.” 10 While visual representations previously sought to depict what was understood as
the naturally determined essence of a particular subject, the mechanical qualities of a camera brought
with it an ease of visualizing the distinct existence of a subject at a particular moment in time.
A perceived ability to objectively “know the world” and operate under the assumption of a
sequential sense of time has a complicated history of development within Western cultures, the
details of which go beyond the scope of this thesis. In brief, historians Lorraine Daston and Peter
Galison note that the concept of objectivity has historically manifested in different forms, and only
9 Alan Colquhoun, “Three Kinds of Historicism” (1983), 2.
10 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Harvard University Press, 2002), 4.

9
relatively recently has “mechanical objectivity [become] fused with other varieties of objectivity, such
as the metaphysical element that makes objectivity synonymous with truth, or the aperspectival
element that identifies objectivity with the escape from any and all perspectives.”
11 Due to visual
limitations of early photosensitive materials and choices of framing made by the operator,
photography’s mechanical sense of objectivity was realized only through the industrialization of the
late nineteenth century. Such mechanical visualizations, developed predominantly through scientific
imagery and theory, were characterized by the lack of human intervention in the depicted
interpretation of a scene. Daston and Galison explain that “scientific authors came to see
mechanical registration as a means of hemming in their own temptation to impose systems, aesthetic
norms, hypotheses, language, even anthropomorphic elements on pictorial representation.”12
(emphasis in original) No longer understood to be a product of immutable natural law, the ability for
humans to relinquish interference in the production of an image offered a new form of objectivity.
While a photographer may decide where to place a camera, and the resulting image may be fuzzier
or less saturated than in “real” life, the photographic image still allowed for an unprecedentedly
reliable capture of a scene as it existed in a single moment in time.
The unique sense of objectivity embodied by a photograph served to influence the
developing concept of historicism as photography gained cultural popularity. German theorist
Siegfried Kracauer notes that “historicist thinking [became] dominant at approximately the same
time as modern photographic technology.… There has never been a time that has known so much
about itself, if knowing about oneself means having a picture of things that is similar to them in a
photographic way.”13 It quickly became evident, however, that representation offered by the
photograph did not wholly depict reality as it is somatically experienced. As Kracauer’s caveat
11 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity” (1992), 123.
12 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” 103.
13 Siegfried Kracauer, The Past's Threshold: Essays on Photography (Diaphanes, 2014), 30-39.

10
implies, photography offers the illusion of an unprecedentedly accurate historic record, yet the very
nature of a photograph as a reproduction of that which it represents distorts its claims to definite
realism. He continues, “in the illustrated publications, the public sees the world, the perception of
which is hindered by these very publications. The spatial continuum from the camera perspective
overtakes the spatial appearance of the cognized subject, and the likeness with the latter blurs the
contours of the subject’s ‘history.’ There has never been a time that has known so little about
itself.”14 The concurrent wealth and lack of knowledge offered by the photograph speaks to the
malleability of adolescent notions of history in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only was the public
learning how to view and judge the photograph, but this unprecedented type of imagery – which
ushered with it a new understanding of objectivity and continuity – encouraged a changed
perspective on the world and its history at large.
The mechanical qualities of the camera continue to influence how people interpret and
interact with photography’s ability to reliably document history. Photographer and scholar Dona
Schwartz describes three distinct methods of considering journalistic photography: “depicting the
subject ‘as the camera sees it,’ depicting it ‘as someone present at the scene would have seen it,’ or to
‘authorize the photographers to make decisions regarding image production consistent with the
prevailing norms governing journalistic representations across communicative modes.’”
15 The first
two methods, though seemingly most objective, depend on a variety of unstable assumptions,
namely that “taking ‘camera vision’ as a rationale would presuppose the use of standardised
equipment, whereas the alignment with a human observer’s visual experience raises numerous
questions, in particular regarding the enormous differences between human perception and ‘camera
14 Siegfried Kracauer, The Past's Threshold: Essays on Photography, 39.
15 Schwartz, Dona. “Professional Oversight: Policing the Credibility of Photojournalism” In Image Ethics in the Digital Age,
eds. Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz and Jay Ruby, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. As cited in Frank E.
Kessler, M. van den Boomen, and S. Lammes, “What You Get is What You See: Digital Images and the Claim on the
Real” (2009), 189-190.

11
vision.’”
16 As photography has become increasingly prevalent in contemporary society and
photographic quality has improved, the differences inherent in human perception and camera vision
can appear less noticeable to the casual observer. Conflating the two threatens to conceal camera
vision’s power to persuade the viewer and distort reality, despite its mechanical sense of objectivity.
Our contemporary image-based culture deems that a photograph is never wholly viewed as a
product of the photographic process when seen in a textbook, on a webpage, or even plastered on a
billboard.As French critic Roland Barthes explains, “whatever it grants to vision and whatever its
manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.” The figure or scene depicted in the
image sticks like glue to our understanding of the photograph itself. Barthes summarizes: “the
referent adheres.” 17 Photography’s history of mechanical objectivity and apparent accuracy of
rendition causes the subject of a photograph to take precedence over our recognition of its medium.
For instance, a photograph of a dancer may prompt questions about the dancer or event whereas a
painting by Edgar Degas may not be interpreted as such a faithful extension of its referent.
Twentieth-century critic Walter Benjamin asserts that the mechanical reproduction afforded
by photographic arts effectively diminishes the distinctiveness of an image and undermines its claim
on artistic authenticity. He notes the benefits of such seemingly objective reproductions on the
democratization of the perception of an image in stating:
To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose
“sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it
extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested
in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing
importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to
reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
18
16 Schwartz, Dona. “Professional Oversight: Policing the Credibility of Photojournalism” In Image Ethics in the Digital Age,
eds. Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz and Jay Ruby, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. As cited in Frank E.
Kessler, M. van den Boomen, and S. Lammes, “What You Get is What You See: Digital Images and the Claim on the
Real,” 189-190.
17 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Vintage Classics, 1993), 6.
18 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), 5.

12
While Benjamin hoped to encourage art’s widespread dissemination as a means of political
engagement in the face of the proletarianization of society in the mid- to late twentieth century, the
potential for a sense of equalizing universality promoted by the image is ultimately infeasible by
contemporary critics due to the rise of celebrity photographers, cultural privileging of certain
subjects over others, and the range in quality of available photographic equipment. Instead it can be
argued that a photograph ascribes to its subject a new aura, one that marks it as a subject that has
been photographed, and which is created concurrently with its new sense of objectivity.
The proliferation of images of architectural landmarks, in particular, results in a shift in the
understanding and appreciation of the general public to such landmarks. Found in travel
scrapbooks, on postcards, and throughout social media, images of architecture have long served as
visual souvenirs that affirm one’s existence in a particular place at a particular time. As Oliver
Wendell Holmes remarks, “There is only one Colosseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of
potential negatives have they shed … we have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble
ourselves with the core.”19 A photograph of the Colosseum is often understood as an extension of
the site itself, existing as a physical remnant that speaks to both the site’s importance in that it was
valuable enough to photograph, and to its verified physical existence at the time of its capture. It is
not uncommon to feel that the Colosseum lives on in this pictorial reproduction even though the
viewer may be thousands of miles away, a new essence of the site embodied within its scaled image.
Rather than learn about architecture of faraway cities from a single, carefully selected
view, the abundance of photographic images deems that contemporary society “has no need for a
witness, a transcendent and discriminating eye, to testify to the significance of events by organizing
and fixing them.… there is no longer a point of view, but visual context.”20 (emphasis in original) In
19 Quoted in William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, 56.
20 David Tomas, “From the Photograph to Postphotographic Practice: Toward a Postoptical Ecology of the Eye”
(1988), 66.

13
an age where everyone with a smartphone can be a photographer, the quantity, rather than quality,
of images of a site can appear to determine its cultural value. So pervasive are images in our daily
lives that “in teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is
worth looking at.”21 A contemporary viewer may be able to identify an image of the Colosseum
more easily than architecture from their home city, simply because they have been inundated with
more images of the Colosseum over the course of their lives than they have stopped to look at the
local built environment.22 An abundance of photographs convey the message that this site is
important, beyond the ascription to any one particular photographer or vantage point.
Even prior to today’s digital era, the accessibility and ease of photography contributed to a
heightened level of production and consumption of the photographic image, to the extent that
viewers’ perception of the referent subject was altered. Don DeLillo’s anecdote about the “Most
Photographed Barn in America,” from the 1985 novel White Noise, describes the perceptual
transformation photography can have over our understanding of the built environment:
We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and
apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started
appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted
five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the
makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for
viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto
lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides - pictures of the barn
taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the
photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some
notes in a little book.
“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.
21 Susan Sontag, On Photography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 3.
22 Some argue that the disparity of knowledge tourists can display between foreign countries and their own home reflects
a deliberate choice to participate in the prewritten universality of an image: “What we gaze upon as tourists may have
been arranged for us in advance; we may go there precisely because other tourists have gone before us; but we remain
free to look the other way, or not to look at all. And we can disrupt the order of things. We can tour Europe before we
tour our own country and construct for ourselves a distinctive arrangement in consciousness of what is familiar to us
and what is foreign. Paris is familiar to me and Kansas remains foreign. Even if the global system of attractions is a fixed
grid, it need not function to determine tourist priorities and tourist behavior” (Dean MacCannell, “Tourist Agency”
(2001), 24.)

14
A long silence followed.
“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by
others.
“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph
reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The
thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve
agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious
experience in a way, like all tourism.”
Another silence ensued.
“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.23
The barn is not seen as a barn because, with knowledge of its context, it can be seen only as a
frequently visited tourist destination. While taking pictures of architecture alters our perception of
the sites, these altered perceptions give new value to culturally significant places. Boris Groys,
philosopher and art critic, argues in favor of the transformative power of this collective perception,
claiming that “A city’s monuments, after all, have not always been standing there simply waiting for
tourists to see them; instead, it was tourism that created these monuments. It is tourism that
monumentalizes a city.... The growing volume of tourism also speeds up the process of
monumentalization.”24 The popularity of mechanically reproduced images of culturally significant
sites serves not only to document the built environment, but also to influence the viewer’s
interpretation of the scene and their place within it.
23 Don DeLillo, White Noise, 12.
24 Boris Groys, Art Power (MIT Press, 2008), 102.

15
DEVELOPMENT OF ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY
While capturing an image today can be accomplished with merely a fraction of a second and
the press of a single button, photographic processes before the digital era required time, attention,
and skill in terms of both the capture of light on film as a negative and its subsequent development
into a positive image. Widely regarded as having been introduced by French and English inventors
in the mid-1800s, photographic processes are based on the chemical affixture to a light-sensitive
surface of the image that is created within a camera obscura. 25 A camera obscura uses the light that
passes through a miniscule hole to project an image upside down within a darkened space onto the
wall opposite the hole. Although numerous cultures have understood this concept since the
prehistoric era, it was not until nineteenth-century Western European inventors experimented with
ways of securing the “pin-hole image” to light-sensitive material that the concept of photography as
a profession or documentary practice was able to come to fruition. 26
As early photographers sought out worthy subjects upon which to test this new technology,
they often prioritized that which could remain still in ample natural light for the long exposures
required by the light sensitive surfaces. As a result, early images frequently featured works of
architecture or cityscapes. What is considered by some to be the first extant photograph, a
“heliograph” captured over eight hours by Nicéphore Niépce, featured an architectural view. 27 28
(Figure 2.1) Other early photographers cited architecture as a prime subject of their work, as
described in Fox Talbot’s 1839 account of his process creating what he called “photogenic
25 Although its exact inventor and date of creation are debated, historians such as Beaumont Newhall consider
photography as we know it to have begun in 1839, “when it was given to the public” by Louis Daguerre, although they
are careful to “avoid anointing any one figure its inventor.” (Jessica McDonald, “A Sensational Story: Helmut
Gernsheim and ‘The World’s First Photograph’” (Routledge, 2014), 19.)
26 Jennifer Ouellette, “Did Prehistoric People Watch the Stars Through This 6,000 Year Old ‘Telescope’?” (2016).
27 Some argue that the publicization of “The Earliest True Photograph” by Helmut Gernsheim in the April 15, 1952
edition of The Times was part of a planned publicity campaign to solidify the contentious idea that Niépce was the “true
inventor of photography.” (Jessica McDonald, “A Sensational Story: Helmut Gernsheim and ‘The World’s First
Photograph,’” 19.)
28 A heliograph is made with the use of a camera obscura and pewter plate coated with a naturally occurring asphalt.

16
drawings” from salted paper coated with silver nitrate: “In the summer of 1835 I made in this way a
great number of representations of my house in the country which is well suited to the purpose,
from its ancient and remarkable architecture. (Figure 2.2) And this building I believe to be the first
that was ever yet known to have drawn its own picture.”29 At an exposure time of around an hour or
two, Fox Talbot’s work was an improvement over the nearly day-long process of Niépce’s
heliographs from almost a decade earlier. The daguerreotype, revealed in 1839 by Louis Daguerre,
featured a sheet of silver-plated copper that offered exposure times as short as four to five minutes.
The opportunity to capture scenes more quickly allowed one of Daguerre’s images of a Parisian
street to become regarded as the earliest photographic image of a human, regardless of the primarily
architectural composition. (Figure 2.3)
29 William Henry Fox Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing” (R & J. E. Taylor, 1839).

17
Figure 2. 1: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Untitled “Point de Vue,” 1827, heliograph on pewter, 16.7 x 20.3 x .15 cm.,
Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, object no.
964:0000:0001, www.hrc.utexas.edu/niepce-heliograph.

18
Figure 2. 2: William Henry Fox Talbot, “Latticed Window (with the Camera Obscura),” 1835, paper negative, 6.9 cm. x
14.9 cm., The National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, UK, object no. 1937-0361,
talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search/catalog/artifact-4085. Handwritten caption by Fox Talbot: “When first made, the
squares of glass about 200 in number could be counted, with help of a lens.”

19
Figure 2. 3: Louis Daguerre, “Boulevard du Temple,” c. 1837 or 1838, daguerreotype, The Photography Book, Phaidon
Press, London, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Boulevard_du_Temple_by_Daguerre.jpg. Considered to be the first
photograph of a person (seen bottom left).
Members of the privileged upper class in the mid-nineteenth century, who typically could
afford expensive photographic equipment, also tended to have the time and resources to seek out
experiences beyond that of their everyday lives. The concurrence of photography’s inception with
inventions of rapid transportation such as the railroad, steamship, and suspension bridge led to
increased opportunities for people who could afford both cameras and travel to capture images of
architecture around the world.30 American photographer Marcus Aurelius Root praised the “selfculture” afforded by new travel opportunities of this era but noted that “comparatively few,
30 Cervin Robinson and Joel Herschman, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the
Present (MIT Press, 1987), 2.

20
however, are able to leave home and business and bear the heavy expenses thus required. But
photography enables us to enjoy the pleasure and the advantages of travel without even crossing our
own thresholds.”31 As such, the development of photography as a profession became deeply
entwined with the evolution, study, and public reverence for architecture.
While significant buildings from around the world had previously been relayed through
drawings, paintings, printed reproductions within books, or tales recounted from personal travel,
photography offered a medium through which architects and civilians alike could appreciate places
outside their own environments. Wealthy scholars such as draftsman Joseph-Philibert Girault de
Prangey studied at the École des Beaux-Arts around the same time that the daguerreotype reached
prominence in Paris.32 Using this new skill, Girault de Prangey subsequently traveled to countries of
the Ottoman empire and Middle East, fueled by his passion for the differing architectural styles and
exoticism that stemmed from the romanticization of colonialism at the time.33 Within three years of
travel he created over eight hundred architectural daguerreotypes, including what is considered the
oldest existing photograph of Greece’s Acropolis. (Figure 2.4) Girault de Prangey’s works provide
useful early images of the built environment for public dissemination at the time of his travels as
well as contemporary study.
31 Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the Pencil (D. Appleton & Company, 1864), 413.
32 Since photography was not yet being taught at the École des Beaux-Arts it is difficult to cite precisely where Girault de
Prangey picked up the skill, though it is believed to be from Louis Daguerre himself due to their overlapping time in
Paris, or by fellow French photographic pioneer, Hippolyte Bayard.
33 Stephen C. Pinson, Sylvie Aubenas, Olivier Caumont, Silvia A. Centeno, Thomas Galifot, Nora W. Kennedy, Grant B.
Romer et al, Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019), 157.

21
Figure 2. 4: Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, “Western Approach to the Acropolis, Athens,” 1842, daguerreotype, 3
11/16 × 9 1/2 in. (9.3 × 24.1 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, object no. 2016.92,
www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/702991. Said Prangey of the labor-intensive process involved in creating
the image: “Nothing in the world is as marvelous or perfect as all that is contained by the Athenian acropolis! As you
might guess, the strongest battle occurred there, and God knows how I exerted myself to take my share of the spoils.”
Unprecedented in its perceived ability to record the truth of a scene, photography appeared
to offer the promise of material permanence in a rapidly changing world. The opportunities this
provided in establishing a cohesive sense of identity prompted government-sponsored
documentation projects as early as just twelve years after the emergence of the daguerreotype. In
1851, France’s Inspector General of Historical Monuments, Prosper Mérimée, established La
Mission Héliographique, a project to document the country’s architectural landmarks through
photography. 34 England’s founding of the Architectural Photographic Association in 1857 featured
a similar inclination toward architectural documentation, though England sought out photographs
featuring buildings from all countries. Both endeavors “underscored the nationalistic tendencies of
the time; subjects were chosen, perhaps subliminally, to reinforce a particular conception of the
significance of certain periods of the past.” For France and England this meant a greater number of
images of late medieval buildings, while “renaissance, baroque, and contemporary architecture
34 La Mission Héliographique was undertaken by five photographers: Hippolite Bayard, Henri LeSecq, Auguste Mestral,
Gustave Le Grey, and Édouard Baldus.

22
attracted less attention.” 35 Although intended as an objective documentary record, these
photographs ultimately reflected a singular perspective and upheld a strengthening of European
nationalism in the nineteenth century.
Improvements to lens and camera design toward the end of the nineteenth century gradually
led to a cultural change in taste away from the darker, more straightforward visual style of the 1880s.
Technological advances in film sensitivity offered even greater creative freedom by allowing the
capture of subjects with shorter exposure times. Cameras at the turn of the twentieth century
allowed for easier handheld use, adaptability in different weather conditions, and more adjustments
for lighting than had been available in earlier designs. These elements enabled the photographer to
contribute more personal intention to an image. (Figure 2.5) Favoring ambiance and artistic
interpretation over the facts of a building, architectural photography of the 1890s onward featured
attempts to capture the “ambient qualities surrounding a subject, often of the light falling on it, and
emphasized the selective aspect of picture taking.” 36 Architectural photographs of this period begin
to feature human figures, referencing the human experience and feeling of a space over the
mechanically objective documentation of a building that had been prioritized in earlier styles.
35 James Ackerman, On the Origins of Architectural Photography (Routledge, 2005), 9.
36 Cervin Robinson and Joel Herschman, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the
Present, 72.

23
Figure 2. 5: Edward J. Steichen, “The Flatiron,” 1904, pigment gum over platinum print, 47.8 × 38.4 cm., The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, object no. 33.43.39, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/267803.
Chosen by Alfred Stieglitz and Steichen for inclusion at the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography held at the
Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York (1910) to promote the idea of photography as fine art rather than factual
documentation.

24
While the increasing popularity of architectural photography in the early 1900s allowed for
exploration of more artistic forms of representation, the period following World War I heightened
an ideological divide in the profession that had been steadily growing since the 1890s. As techniques
and ideologies progressed, differing schools of photography emerged that separated the artistic
choices of “professional” photographers, whose work tended to be technically conservative and
marketable, and “amateur” photographers, whose work leaned more toward artistry and
innovation.37 Many architectural photographers of this time served as subordinate to the architects
of the work they captured, adhering to the non-interference that upheld the photograph’s
mechanical objectivity by letting the architect’s vision overpower the photograph as a work of art in
itself. While architects used the visualizations afforded by the camera as a source of design
inspiration and marketing power, the photographer often remained “a nameless presence …
[effectively meaning that their photographs] could be signed by the author of the building rather
than by the author of the representation.”
38 Although seemingly nameless, the photographers whose
work showcased marketable new buildings worked closely with architects to relay their innovative
design ideas in visually compelling ways.39
Around this time, architects (by way of their photographers) began experimenting with
publishing photomontage manipulations under the guise of truthful images.40 Hoping to illuminate
the clean, geometric, unadorned form that characterized his theories of modernism, Le Corbusier
37 Cervin Robinson and Joel Herschman, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the
Present, 110.
38 Barry Bergdoll, “A Matter of Time: Architects and Photographers in Second Empire France” (Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1994), 100.
39
This vital collaboration between architect and photographer continues today, with Spanish architect Alberto Campo
Baeza quoted in 2015, “In the end we architects depend on the photographers. I’ve always maintained that a bad
architect with a good photographer is a hypocrite, and a good architect with a bad photographer is an imbecile.” (Ismael
Marinero, “Borraría Muchas Cosas de Madrid” (2015).)
40 Composite and manipulated analog photography have a long history of development outside their use in architecture,
including Oscar Rejlander’s image “The Two Ways of Life” (1857) and Francis Galton’s composite portraiture of the
1880s. For more examples of manipulated analog photographs, see Mia Fineman’s Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before
Photoshop (2012).

25
published a series of altered images of wheat grain silos in his seminal 1923 collection of essays, Vers
une Architecture. (Figure 2.6) The same shots had been published by Walter Gropius a decade prior in
the 1913 Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes, yet with more ornamentation on the building and a cited
location of Buenos Aires rather than Corbusier’s claim of Canada. (Figure 2.7) By applying gouache
to the original images, Corbusier shaped what were intended to be honest representations of modest
infrastructure into forms that adhered to his modernist vision.41 This act of intervention, though an
affront to the camera’s mechanical objectivity, upheld the principle that “…there was in modernism
the idea of natural law and a return to the basic principles of artistic form.”
42 In visually conveying
his understanding of the natural law that dictates how the grain silo ought to look, Corbusier’s
manipulated use of photography remains aligned with his interpretation of the world. Other
professional architectural photographers at this time similarly played with versions of reality, though
less boldly manipulative than Le Corbusier. Photographers Samuel H. Gottscho and F. S. Lincoln
began depicting propagandized utopias of modern styles such as Art Deco, deliberately obscuring
the realities of urban life that were unfolding in cities across America during the Great Depression.43
41 William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, 202.
42 Alan Colquhoun, “Three Kinds of Historicism,” 6.
43 Cervin Robinson and Joel Herschman, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the
Present, 123.

26
Figure 2. 6: Le Corbusier,“Wheat Silos and Elevators in Canada” in Vers une Architecture, 1923. Image altered (missing
roof pediments) from Gropius original (Figure 2.7).

27
Figure 2. 7: Walter Gropius, “Wheat Silo in Buenos Aires,” in Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes, 1913, Collection
Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

28
In contrast, the artistry of the amateur photographer favored the gritty realities of
contemporary life. The 1930s saw a shift in artistic photography away from the ambiance and
indiscernible qualities previously championed by earlier art photographers like Alfred Stieglitz or
Edward J. Steichen, evidenced in the innovative work of people like Berenice Abbott. Following her
assistantship to Man Ray, who frequently insisted that “he wanted to be recognized as an artist, not
as a photographer,” and her work with Eugène Atget, a documentary photographer who “refused to
call himself an artist,”Abbott instead embraced the artistry of documentary photography by
exploring New York City’s developing urbanization for her book, Changing New York (1939).
44, 45
Abbott’s work reflects the wide-context views, proper exposure, and perspective correction that
marks conceptions of effective architectural documentation, yet still features some artistic liberty in
her politicized depiction of the urban landscape. 46 (Figure 2.8)
44 Alan Riding, “Man Ray Without the Secrets: [Biography]” (1998).
45 Jesus Vassallo, “Documentary Photography and Preservation, or The Problem of Truth and Beauty” (2014), 26.
46 Abbott specified three themes of her work: “the diversity of the inhabitants of the city, the physical presence of the
places in which they live and work, and the energy embodied in the activities they perform.” (Jesus Vassallo,
“Documentary Photography and Preservation, or The Problem of Truth and Beauty,” 27.)

29
Figure 2. 8: Berenice Abbott, “Macdougal Alley (From MacDougal Street between West 8th Street and Washington
Square North),” 1936, gelatin silver photograph, 16 x 20 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, object no. 1975.83.7,
americanart.si.edu/artwork/macdougal-alley-between-8th-street-and-washington-sq-north-15.

30
The catastrophic economic crisis that marked the Great Depression of the 1930s coincided
with federal recognition of the benefits of a visual survey of America, supported by the Roosevelt
administration’s New Deal.47 Six years into her book project but unable to sustain a professional
career through architectural documentation alone, Abbott was among those hired by the Federal Art
Project (FAP) to complete her record of New York’s urban environment. Other non-professional
skilled photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Arthur Rothstein
were hired to document the effects of New Deal funding on migrant workers across the country for
programs such as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) or Works Progress Administration
(WPA). These photographic efforts often included images of aging structures in their attempt at a
holistic representation of the American cultural landscape. 48 More deliberate efforts at cataloging
American architectural legacies were later established under the WPA, such as the 1933 initiation of
the Historic American Buildings Survey, or the New York City Tax Department’s 1939-1941 project
to document buildings throughout the five boroughs to assess real property taxes.
49
The ability to photograph had been available to a novice public since the invention of the
Kodak by George Eastman in 1888, followed by the Kodak Brownie in 1900, but was heightened in
the 1950s due to technological advancements and economic prosperity following World War II.
50
Camera manufacturers such as Nikon, Canon, and Leica began producing similarly affordable
amateur camera models, though using 35-millimeter film rather than Kodak’s roll film, the ease of
which helped encourage photography among the untrained public. As more people became able to
47 David M. Kennedy, “What the New Deal Did” (2009), 251.
48 Evans’s documentation style of highly detailed and evenly lit, impersonal compositions, oriented squarely with the
frame, which was established during his 1931 documentation of Victorian homes in Boston and published in
“Photographs of Nineteenth-Century American Houses” eventually became “a guideline for the other photographers of
the [FSA] unit,” (Jesus Vassallo, “Documentary Photography and Preservation, or The Problem of Truth and Beauty,”
28.)
49 Gabrielle Esperdy, “A Taxing Photograph: The WPA Real Property Survey of New York City” (2004), 123.
50 Both Kodak models are handheld, roll-film cameras that were simple to use. The Brownie offered simpler operation
and cheaper acquisition and processing costs than its predecessor, making it more popular with average American
families until as late as the 1960s.

31
take, share, and view their own photographs, architecture often remained a key visual subject
alongside portraiture and family snapshots.
As photographic styles developed into the 1950s and ’60s, architectural photography became
pivotal in the promotion of the modern movement during the post-World War II building boom.
Sleek, emotionally imbued scenes - which often featured posed models by photographers such as
Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, Balthazar Korab, Marvin Rand, Morley Baer, Ken Hedrich, and Henry
Blessing - helped create exciting, modern images of a prosperous future.51 Architects often used
professional photography as a vehicle for persuasion of the success of their concept rather than an
honest documentation of the building. For instance, “in a letter reflecting on Shulman’s
photography, [Richard] Neutra revealed this dialectical split between the photograph of modern
architecture and the building itself: ‘[Shulman’s] work will survive me. Film [is] stronger and good
glossy prints are easier [to] ship than brute concrete, stainless steel, or even ideas.””
52 As innovative
styles and designs developed among architects, photography proved essential in communicating
these ideas to a global audience.
At the same time, urban renewal efforts in American cities offered an opportunity for
architectural photography to be useful in persuading the public and city officials. While deceptive
photographs highlighting deteriorating existing conditions and “blight” were framed by
photographers to make a persuasive case in favor of renewal projects, opponents of the programs
undertook documentation and architectural survey efforts to advocate for the preservation of the
buildings slated for demolition.53 In Chicago, photographer and professor Aaron Siskind began a
class assignment at IIT Institute of Design to document the underappreciated works of Dankmar
Adler and Louis Sullivan. Recognizing the value of these buildings to Chicago’s cultural and
51 Joseph Rosa, “Architectural Photography and the Construction of Modern Architecture” (Taylor & Francis, 1998), 99.
52 Joseph Rosa, “Architectural Photography and the Construction of Modern Architecture,” 104.
53 Mike Christenson, “Photography in the Urban Renewal Toolkit: The Case of Pruitt-Igoe” (2017), 155.

32
architectural legacy, student Richard Nickel continued the documentation project beyond the scope
of the class, with the intention of publishing a comprehensive book of documentary photographs,
The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan. Imbued with a passion for architecture, Nickel’s
photographs highlight the unique ornamentation and character of the buildings in a way that
encourages deeper appreciation for what, at the time, had been considered outdated designs. (Figure
2.9) Nickel died while salvaging architectural ornament from the Chicago Stock Exchange in the
midst of its demolition. His documentation and preservation efforts left a lasting impression in
terms of Chicago’s built environment and the legacy of Adler & Sullivan, leading to the publication
of several posthumous photo and biographical books.
Figure 2. 9: Richard Nickel, “Exterior Top Story Detail - Schiller Building, 64 West Randolph Street, Chicago, Cook
County, IL” (photocopy of original image), 1961, HABS ILL,16-CHIG,60—1, Library of Congress,
www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.il0034.photos/?sp=1.

33
Documentary photography as an art form served as the primary focus of the groundbreaking
1975 exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape held in Rochester, New York.
The show featured the work of ten photographers whose compositions intended to posit a new
vision of the American landscape. 54, 55 Devoid of blatant personal narrative, these images favored
orthogonal, unposed scenes of mundane structures taken in flat light. Considered distanced,
deadpan, and even boring, the exhibition sought to present everyday scenes of postwar suburban
America in a frank, unromanticized manner. 56 Aligned with conceptual concerns of artistic
movements at the time, the display of this style of photography within an artistic gallery space
encouraged the viewer to assign their own interpretations to the documentary landscapes presented,
blurring the long-held division between documentation and art.57
54 Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (Yale University Press, 2008), 305.
55 Photographers included: Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas
Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr.
56 Victoria Muskvik, “‘Boring Photography.’ American New Topographics, Socialist Boredom, and Post-Soviet Deadpan
Photography” (2023), 4.
57 Ruth Rosengarten, “Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age” (Taylor & Francis,
2015).

34
Chapter Two: Architectural Photography As Documentation
“As records - deposits - of the past, buildings and photographs are concrete
instances of social memory in action: they are, from corner to corner and from
subcellar to roof peak, impure fragments of the churn of time.”
- Joel Smith, The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time (2011)
INTERPRETATIONS OF VISION
One of many avenues for architectural documentation, the camera is merely a tool used to
present the image of a site in a way that is particularly attuned to human perception. Early Greek
theorists believed that visual rays “did not lead from the light source to the eye (as in today’s
understanding), but rather in the exact opposite direction from the eye to the light source.”58 This
caused early visual art to appear unnaturally flattened, every element represented as being equal
distance from the viewer. Without the vanishing point that marks contemporary visual media, the
infinity of space as processed by the human eye was not conveyed through such early depictions.
Geometric representational precepts that emerged within artistic practices during the Italian
Renaissance emphasized nature’s self-depicted essence in a way earlier methods of visual
representation had not. This development of linear perspective ensured that “all of the lines,
corners, and proportions in an image appear exactly the same as the image they reproduce in the
retina.”59 Use of the camera obscura in conjunction with principles of trigonometry further
encouraged the widespread understanding that the world is instead reflected within our eyes from an
external light source, since the camera obscura itself is “a device that calculated trigonometrical
functions completely automatically, simply because it focused light into a single bundle of straight
lines and then allowed them to follow their course, [and subsequently] made the revolutionary
58 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media (Polity Press, 2010), 50.
59 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, 49.

35
concept of a perfect perspective painting possible.”60 The emphasis on linear perspective of this
period resulted in Renaissance fresco paintings that prioritized vertically parallel and plumb lines.
Such paintings reflect both practical and aesthetic considerations, having been
painted into existing architectural spaces and therefore the images had to match
the architecture of the buildings whose walls they decorated. These Renaissance
frescoes of architecture existed as permanent parts of the buildings but the
subjective aesthetic choice to stick with one or two-point perspective continued
into canvas paintings of architecture and later photography of architecture. 61
Although subtly different from how a person might view a building from ground level, in which
vertical lines converge at a point (as is seen in three-point perspective), this straight-on view became
the preeminent mode of architectural representation to this day.
While the built environment has been studied and visualized for as long as humans have
built shelters, its professionalization and inclusion within academic curricula remains a relatively
recent endeavor. Architecture as an academic pursuit was first taught in France as early as 1671 at
the Académie Royale d’Architecture. The school remained in operation only until 1793, when
painter-turned-politician Jacques-Louis David called for the suppression of “all corporations of the
arts” in an attempt to decry the privilege and hierarchy exhibited by government sponsored arts
endeavors during the French Revolution.62 Regardless of the school’s disestablishment, architecture
remained the subject of classes at the Louvre until the discipline’s formal revival in 1816 as a
department within the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
63 Professional architecture education in the United
States followed shortly after the success of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, with the establishment of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s program in 1868.64 Based on Beaux Arts education,
60 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, 52.
61 James Ewing, Follow the Sun: A Field Guide to Architectural Photography in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2016), 12.
62 Christopher Drew Armstrong, “The Académie Royale d’Architecture (1671-1793)” (2017), 25.
63 Christopher Drew Armstrong, “The Académie Royale d’Architecture (1671-1793),” 2.
64 John Andrew Chewning, “William Robert Ware and the Beginnings of Architectural Education in the United States,
1861-1881” (MIT, 1986), 72.

36
academic architectural programs encouraged the study of historical precedents to establish a
foundational understanding of architecture that could inform future designs. As a result,
architectural history and existing building documentation became deeply embedded in professional
architectural training programs from an early age.
Architectural photography began to supersede architectural drawings as a means of
documentation in the 1880s and 1890s, when the new halftone printing process allowed for the
distribution of mechanically reproduced images in greater quantities than was previously possible.
Similar to nineteenth-century scientific atlases in their transition from hand-drawn illustrations to
seemingly more objective forms of typological representation, the use of “characteristic images [to
present] individual cases as exemplary and illustrative of broader classes and causal processes,”
ensured that photography was useful in classifying architectural typologies as these distinctions were
beginning to be deliberated and taught as a part of architectural curriculums.65 The daguerreotype
and subsequent photographic processes allowed for the creation of a “method grounded on systems
of classification [that] could not [have been] developed without the capacity to make comparisons
between buildings and groups of buildings. Photographs are fundamental to the practice of historical
research and interpretation because they give the scholar an almost infinitely expandable collection
of visual records of buildings and details of buildings in his or her area of research.”66 Some early
photographic architectural surveys were published in pioneering books such as George William
Sheldon’s Artistic Country Seats (1886-87), D. Appleton’s Artistic Houses of 1883-84, and Ticknor &
Company’s Monographs of American Architecture (1886), which contributed to bringing contemporary
American vernacular designs to a broader audience.
65 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” 95.
66 James S. Ackerman, “On the Origins of Architectural Photography,” 12.

37
Using daguerreotypes to study and record historic buildings, influential nineteenth-century
critic John Ruskin valued documentation, nonintervention, and display of apparent age.67 The idea
of visual truth provided by the camera helped capture the patina and decay so valued by Ruskin in a
building. As early as the 1840s, Ruskin encouraged his readers to take advantage of “every
opportunity afforded by scaffolding to approach [architecture] closely ... putting the camera in any
position that will command [it].”68 Yet his ideology of preservation extended beyond merely
aesthetic qualities, having written of his disapproval of the illogical impracticality of decay depicted
in Picturesque paintings of the era.69 The patina of a building was valuable for its functional and
cultural implications, which required documentation and study to fully appreciate. Ruskin, like many
other photographers at the time, considered a photograph a valuable historic document. The
perceived veracity offered by photography served a preeminent role in supporting Ruskin’s early
architectural studies.
However, such appreciation of photography did not last throughout his career. By the 1870s,
Ruskin began writing of the medium’s deceptive qualities, stating, “[Photographs] are popularly
supposed to be ‘true,’ and, at the worst, they are so, in the sense in which an echo is true to a
conversation of which it omits the most important syllables and re-duplicates the rest.”70 Having
recognized the limitations of a photograph and reconsidered notions of authenticity, Ruskin hints at
the impending cultural divorce of photography from its initial understanding as a means of
objective, truthful documentation. This shift is not unusual in the years following the introduction of
new technology, but nevertheless marks an important turning point in how photographs were
67 Karen Burns, “Topographies of Tourism: ‘Documentary’ Photography and The Stones of Venice,” (1997).
68 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (John B. Alden, 1885), 218.
69 Ruskin criticized the way in which “in a completely picturesque object, as an old cottage or mill, there are introduced,
by various circumstances not essential to it, but, on the whole, generally somewhat detrimental to it as cottage or mill …
elements of sublimity … belonging in a parasitical manner to the building.” (Wolfgang Kemp and Joyce Rheuban,
“Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition” (1990), 106.)
70 Michael Harvey, “Ruskin and Photography” (1984), 25.

38
regarded as the field of historic architectural study evolved toward the latter half of the nineteenth
century.
The camera’s subjectivity likewise became evident within architectural survey efforts, such as
the aforementioned Mission Héliographique of 1851. Commissioners quickly realized “that each
photographer had a completely different technique and approach to the subject matter, therefore
rendering the effort to create a homogeneous body of work utterly useless.” In its unrealistic pursuit
of complete uniformity, France’s mission was subsequently canceled and considered a failure by its
commissioners. Regardless, this attempt proved valuable in its recognition of “the need for a
photographic language suited to the views of architects and architecture historians, while in the
process shattering the previously held belief that photography was a merely scientific process devoid
of human agency.”71 In succumbing to the inherent artistic choices found within photography, a
variety of methods for depicting architecture and conveying design intentions were able to progress
alongside photographic improvements and evolving notions of architectural documentation.
The eventual development of designed visual languages with the intention of supporting
architects’ unique visions led to a divergence of academic focus within architectural studies. Central
to the architectural phenomenology movement that emerged in opposition to postwar Modernism,
architect Christian Norberg-Schulz published an influential book in 1962 of photographs and
analysis titled Intentions in Architecture. Although the ocularcentrism displayed by this photographic
analysis was unique in comparison with other phenomenologists and historians of the time who
privileged the perception of authority that written text provided, Norberg-Schulz’s use of
photographs reflected an attempt described by theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos to similarly conceal
“doubt behind an authorial mask.” Stemming from concepts shared with Le Corbusier of
photography as a means for visually depicting the natural law inherent within the built environment,
71 Jesus Vassallo, “Documentary Photography and Preservation, or The Problem of Truth and Beauty,” 17.

39
Otero-Pailos further asserts that Norberg-Schulz “privileged photographs because they more easily
concealed the hand of their author, allowing the photos to stand as an objective visual discourse.”
72
Although his use of imagery aligned with Modernist notions of objectivity, Norberg-Schulz’s
deliberate collection and accompanying critique broadened previous architectural analysis by
“[challenging] architects to be more intellectually discerning and [defying] historians to be more
visually literate.”73 This overlap between visual studies and critical analysis allowed space for
architectural history to develop as a discipline distinct from either architecture or art history.
The growing prevalence of historic and architectural studies grounded in their use of visual
media evolved alongside contemporary Western archival practices dictating the methods and
ideologies required to maintain such items. When used for documentary or categorization purposes,
unstable assumptions of photographic objectivity can often be similarly ascribed to the archive that
houses such images. Heavily governed by nineteenth-century positivist logic, the initial illusion of an
entirely unbiased, neutral archive has ultimately been shattered by contemporary analysis of
circumstantial influence. As contemporary practice “shift[s] away from viewing records as static
physical objects, and towards understanding them as dynamic virtual concepts; [we must also] shift
away from looking at records as the passive products of human or administrative activity and
towards considering records as active agents themselves in the formation of human and
organizational memory.”74 Rather than value archival material for its physical longevity or
unattainably authentic representation, contemporary archivists focus instead on the use and cultural
implication of their collections.
72 Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (University of Minnesota
Press, 2010), 158-159.
73 Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern, 154.
74 Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts” (2001), 4.

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Since its initial presentation to the public, photography has been linked with the idea of
artificial memory preservation. (Figure 3.1) As early as 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dubbed the
new medium, “the mirror with a memory.”75 Considered social memory repositories, both archives
and photographs appear to offer the ability for permanent remembrance that evades the human
mind and lifespan. French historian Pierre Nora considers the idea of modern memory to be “above
all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the
visibility of the image.” By relying on tangible outlets to fulfill the role of fleeting human functions,
the mind is relieved of some of the burden of remembering. Nora continues, “the less memory is
experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward
signs - hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete
conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past.”76 Although surrendering
human memory to the perceived permanency of a photograph seems appealingly effective in
preserving what our natural minds cannot, the photograph exhibits its own unique constraints.
75 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” (1859).
76 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” (1989), 13.

41
Figure 3. 1: Unknown illustrator, Kodak advertisement from Life magazine, December 18, 1950, Eastman Kodak
Company.

42
The term “archive fever” describes the fervent pursuit of symbolic longevity when faced
with the inevitability of loss, such as that inherent in the limitations of memory. Coined by French
philosopher Jacques Derrida, humanity’s finitude and simultaneous “in-finite movement of radical
destruction” is cited as the driving force “without which no archive desire or fever would happen.”77
Yet this urge for complete preservation of the past and present defies the limits of natural memory
and bestows unnatural responsibility to our archives and the photographs held within. Historian
Jacques LeGoff notes that “the document is not objective, innocent raw material but expresses past
[or present] society’s power over memory and over the future: the document is what remains.”78 In
relegating photographs to the task of eternal memory that evades us as humans, they function not as
true accounts of history but instead as symbols of an attempt at domination over ephemerality.
The photograph and the archive act as intentional statements rejecting inevitable mortality,
though by nature both are precluded from realistic success. Instead, embracing the nuances of
memory’s limitations encourages “the possibility that both remembering and photographs are
inherently dynamic … and that as such they are best explored not as imperfect approximations of a
remote original, but as creative processes in their own right, in their production, circulation and
reception.”79 Recognition of photographic dynamism speaks to the cultural shift away from
metaphysical sensory truth or aperspectival representation as exclusive markers of objectivity. In a
similar vein, the archive’s initial claims to permanence and perfection - which attempted to emulate
the perceived stability of the natural world through the type and display of the records it preserves -
can be reconsidered according to the dynamic human influence intrinsic to its existence.
77 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 59.
78 Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, 59-60 as cited in Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New
Formulations for Old Concepts,” 8.
79 Olga Shevchenko, “The Mirror with a Memory” (Routledge, 2015), 274.

43
The rise of the digital age in the twentieth century brought with it a shift in how archival
institutions regard their collections, deferring from their previous focus on material properties to
placing value on the perceived image itself. Rather than attempt “permanent preservation” of
records as a source of historic evidence, the focus is now on managing the creation of such records.
80 Archival professionals no longer consider archives to be environments in which to encase the
past. Contrary to common misconception “the future of digital preservation does not lie in the
maintenance of old computing systems and hardware.”81 Instead, digital preservation of archival
records relies on the proactive evolution of migrating practices to future systems as technology
advances.
These technological changes evidently become archival descriptors in themselves, providing
context on the environment into which each image was born. Embracing the evolution of image
capture devices allows the medium itself to supply what Joan Schwartz, photography specialist at the
National Archives of Canada, describes as
meaningful information which permits database users to distinguish clearly and
immediately between forms of representation which function in very different
ways, carry different burdens, and raise different expectations of reliability. The
word ‘daguerreotype’ for example indicates far more than process. It immediately
narrows the date of the document to the twenty-year period of the 1840s and
1850s.82
Media identifiers in the digital age may appear more elusive to the average viewer than the very
notable differences between a daguerreotype and a 35mm film negative, for instance. Whereas these
analog examples can be haptically examined as tangible objects, the digital image as created by a
smartphone, Canon EOS R5, or PhaseOne XF IQ4 are largely indistinguishable to the untrained
80 Theodore R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives (University of Chicago Press, 1956), 16.
81 Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation (John Hopkins University Press, 2018), 58.
82 Joan Schwartz, “Coming to Terms with Photographs: Descriptive Standards, Linguistic ‘Othering,’ and the Margins of
Archivy” (2002), 154.

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eye. While the medium in this case is not equivalent to the message, as in McLuhan’s iconic phrase,
the archive of the digital age allows space for the nuances of new media to supply additional cultural
insight to the records they accompany.83 The most notable byproduct of prioritizing this context of
creation is the loss of an attempt at determinedly elusive total objectivity.
By existing on the margins of physical materiality, digital media brings with it a new
perspective on art theorist Thierry de Duve’s assertion that a photograph “swivels” between its
referent and its own materiality.84 Simultaneously encoded as bits onto storage media, coded
according to its unique file format, rendered on an infinite number of computer screens, and
carrying the distinct historic context of its individual production, a digital image contains within itself
a multitude of interpretative potential. Most modern digital image collections recognize that the file
is a carrier of information rather than an artifact in itself. When a documentation effort “focus[es]
less on artifactual qualities of digital media and treat[s] it instead as a carrier,” the accessibility and
dissemination of the data is given priority. By “tightly establish[ing a project’s] intention like this, it
becomes possible to produce normalized content that will be far easier to access in the future.”85 As
documentation concerns itself more closely with the image’s referent than the materiality of the
image itself, ensuring future access can be achieved regardless of medium.
DEVELOPMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHIC OPERATION
Human vision is formed by a succession of conscious saccades, or rapid eye movements,
that craft fleeting but intentional compositions as our eyes look around. A camera operates very
similarly to the complicated mechanics of a human eye “in that it has focusing optics, pigmented
83 Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message” (Routledge, 2017), 390.
84 Thierry de Duve, “Bernd and Hilla Becher or Monumentary Photography,” 8. as cited in Sarah Blankenbaker and Erin
Besler, “Neither/Nor: Unfaithful Images in Photography and Preservation” (2014), 2.
85 Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 89.

45
layers that filter visible light into three different spectral regions, photosensitive cells that detect the
arrival of light quanta, some post-receptoral processing of the raw information, and a pathway for
transmission of visual information to other parts of the system.”86 Based on the fundamentals of the
pinhole effect, in which an image is projected onto an opposite surface by way of light passing
through a small hole in an object - such as a camera obscura or the eye’s pupil - both analog and
digital cameras expand upon this principle in ways that affix the resultant image to either a sheet of
film or pattern of pixels. (Figure 3.2)
The size of the hole through which light enters is controlled by the aperture of a camera’s
lens, measured in f-stops. As light passes through the lens, it is blocked from reaching the back of
the camera by the shutter, which forms a barrier to prevent the film or digital sensor from becoming
flooded with light. By limiting the amount of time that light can reach the sensor with varying speeds
of opening and closing this barrier, this measurement, combined with the aperture and the particular
sensitivity level of the film or digital sensor (ASA or ISO), can manipulate the exposure of the
image. Differences in the type of lens, body of the camera, size of the sensor, type of film or digital
file, and development or post-processing procedure allow for a variety of creative choices in the
capture of a single image.
86 Lindsay MacDonald, Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage (Taylor & Francis Group, 2006), 294.

46
Figure 3. 2: Gemma Frisius, “First published illustration of camera obscura” in De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica,
1545, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1545_gemma_frisius_-_camera-obscura-sonnenfinsternis_1545-650x337.jpg.
Distinction between the material properties of film and digital images is often explained in
terms of the difference between continuous and discrete representation. In simple terms, continuous
motion is akin to rolling down a ramp, while discrete motion can be understood as a set of steps.
Film serves as a continuous representation, with an indefinite level of detail and smoothness to the
gradation of light and shadows that, even if enlarged, render as smooth curves. Digital images, on
the other hand, are composed of a grid of pixels that hold a finite amount of visual information.
When enlarged, a digital image reveals its foundational pixelated grid in stark contrast to the smooth,
high quality of an enlarged film image. The grid of pixels can be identified, counted, and easily
manipulated by swapping one square in the grid for another of a different color or tone; but the
gradient of film (or the levels on a ramp) cannot be so easily distinguished or seamlessly altered.
Photographic manipulation has nevertheless existed long before the ease offered by digital
post-processing software. Before even the widespread popularity of digital imaging, “in 1989 -
photography’s sesquicentennial year - The Wall Street Journal estimated that ten percent of all color

47
photographs published in the United States were being digitally retouched or altered.”87 These
alterations were not only being performed by people whose work relies on fabricated narratives,
such as artists or advertising agencies. In 1982, National Geographic, a magazine known since 1905 for
its publication of documentary photography, digitally altered a photograph of the Pyramids of Giza
so as to better fit the scene within the cover’s vertical orientation. (Figure 3.3) National Geographic’s
editor later described the deceptive structural adjustment to these iconic monuments as having
“retroactively repositioned” them to establish a new point of view. 88
Figure 3. 3: Gordon Gahan, National Geographic cover (featuring a digitally manipulated image of the Pyramids of
Giza), February 1982.
As computing technologies began to emerge in the public realm through the 1970s and ‘80s,
the concept of digital imaging quickly followed. Although digital imaging had technically existed in
some form since the invention of a digital scanner in the late 1950s, what we consider a digital
camera today did not reach American consumer markets until Dycam released the Model 1, with a
87 William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, 16.
88 William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, 16.

48
resolution of 0.09 megapixels (MP), in 1991. 89 90 The years that followed saw an exponential increase
in digital camera developments from companies such as Sony, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Hitachi, and
Kodak. Until digital photography could compete with the image quality and perspective controls
offered by film cameras, most professional and amateur architectural photographers did not make
the switch. Some even continue to work exclusively in film today, like contemporary architectural
photographers Hélène Binet and Tom Zimmerman.
Most photographers, however, adapted to the changing technology, like Iwan Baan, Carol
Highsmith, Andrew Prokos, and Tim Street-Porter, among countless others. Highsmith donates all
her images of American people and places to the Library of Congress, extolling the benefits of
digital on C-SPAN in 2011, at a time when the widespread abandonment of film appeared
imminent.
Once digital became high resolution enough, then I said, okay, that’s it. I kind of
dragged the Library of Congress with me, and now they’re solidly on board…. You
know that film is almost gone, okay, so I have a whole old darkroom full of four-byfive film that I’ve shot over the last 30 years. In about 25 years, you may have
problems even getting film scanned. We now are taking digital images. And there’s
probably billions of images being taken every day. The problem is, what happens
when digital goes away? So, what I’m doing is I’m taking these high-resolution digital
images. They’re not cell phone images. Okay? That’s a lot of what’s being taken. And
I’m donating them copyright-free, so that we can put them away; tuck them away, so
that we can see what America looked like at the turn of the 21st century…. The
wonderful thing about the Library of Congress is they will be readable 100 years
from now because they’ll be woven onto whatever comes next. And they’ll go into
the Archives. They’ll go and be tucked away. There’s no end date on them. So they’re
not going to just go away like the majority of images will.91
Highsmith’s distinction between her photographs and cell phone images reveals the numerous tracts
of digital photography that were becoming available to the public. Development of novice cameras
89 Gerard O’Regan, “Digital Photography” (Springer, 2018) 109.
90 The “first digital camera” is widely acknowledged as having been created in 1975 by Eastman Kodak engineer Steven
Sasson. It used a charge-coupled device (CCD) and lens from a movie camera, taking “still television images.” However,
Kodak saw no commercial potential due to the lower image quality and rejected the idea. (Gerard O’Regan, “Digital
Photography,” 109.)
91 Brian Lamb, “Q&A with Carol Highsmith” (C-SPAN, 2011), 58:30.

49
continued concurrently with the evolution of photographic advancements, but no invention was as
instrumental in bringing the ease of photography to the general public as that of the digital camera
and subsequent camera phone. Following digital developments of the 1990s, Samsung released the
first cell phone with a built-in 0.35MP camera, SCH-V200, in June 2000. Although Highsmith
subsequently upgraded to a 50.6MP Canon EOS 5DS and a 150MP PhaseOne IQ4, camera phone
technology has advanced to the point that the resolution of a phone image taken today may be
similar to or better than that taken by Highsmith’s professional camera in 2011.92
The rise of digital technologies has brought with it a wealth of control over image creation.
As these technologies continue to advance beyond basic computational systems to include
computer-generated images, content fabricated by artificial intelligence, or immersive visualizations
of virtual or augmented reality, it can appear as though the chasm between such media and analog
photography is growing at a rapid pace. Yet since both methods of creation exist as highly
controlled forms of mediating the viewers’ perception of the world, digital theorist Lev Manovich
views this rift as a means of deepening our cultural analysis of the image. Manovich argues that “the
digital image tears apart the net of semiotic codes, modes of display, and patterns of spectatorship in
modern visual culture - and, at the same time, weaves this net even stronger. The digital image
annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.”93
Through their cultural prevalence and accessibility in contemporary society, digital cameras,
photographic processing software, and artificial intelligence have all but destroyed the traditional
role of photography and historic notions of authenticity. Yet in this destruction lies a paradoxical
92 Highsmith’s first born-digital images were submitted to the Library of Congress as early as 2010, although her images
were not accompanied by metadata about the make or model of camera used until nearly fifteen years later. For this
reason, there is no way to verify a comparison between her initial DSLR camera quality and the quality of smartphone
cameras today, although a professional-grade Canon EOS 7D released in 2010 produced images of only 18MP,
compared to the 64MP images taken with the Google Pixel 7a (2023) discussed in chapter three.
93 Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography” (1955), 60.

50
strengthening of the perceived value of the image within modern visual culture. Just as the
mechanical nature of early cameras redefined concepts of objectivity, digital creation likewise crafts
an evolved interpretation of what the image means for contemporary culture.
Today, imagery is so prolific that statistics about how many published images are retouched
are nearly impossible to calculate, although sources estimate the number is anywhere between 30
and 90 percent of all photographs published online.94 The idea that a published image would not be
retouched in some way, even if just in terms of an adjustment of color and tonal range needed to
enhance the appeal of an unprocessed (RAW) image, is practically incomprehensible. Rather than
shatter our perception of reality, this assumption that images feature some degree of manipulation
encourages “a healthy skepticism…. We no longer ask whether it is retouched—we can safely
assume all photographs are illustrations.” Appreciated for their abilities to communicate visual
concepts rather than explicitly recreate reality, “the digital era has liberated photography from the
burden of implied truth.”95 Although the aim of documentary photography is to create an accurate
record of the historic built environment, the understanding that no photograph can ever - or
necessarily need ever - achieve fully objective accuracy frees photographic practice from the burden
of restrictions against minor correctional adjustments that are necessary in presenting the most
successful communication of a site’s significance.
TOOLS FOR PHOTOGRAPHY
Analog cameras exist in a variety of formats, although for the purposes of architectural
documentation, sheet film cameras (predominantly in large formats such as 4" x 5", 5" x 7", or 8" x
94 Phillip Ozimek, Semina Lainas, Hans-Werner Bierhoff, and Elke Rohmann, “How photo editing in social media
shapes self-perceived attractiveness and self-esteem via self-objectification and physical appearance comparisons” (2023),
99.
95 James Ewing, Follow the Sun: A Field Guide to Architectural Photography in the Digital Age, 23.

51
10") are most popular.96 The large film size of such cameras allows for greater versatility over
perspective controls and captures a higher level of detail than can be rendered on a smaller piece of
film. There are three basic types of large-format camera: monorail, folding field cameras, and press
cameras. The latter two are more lightweight and portable than a monorail camera, although allow
for less control over the range of movements than a monorail offers. These cameras comprise three
primary parts: the front standard that holds the lens, the bellows in the middle, and the rear standard
that holds the film at the back. A monorail model allows for the front and rear standard to both be
raised and lowered, as well as swung or shifted from side to side, forward and back, or up and down.
This helps correct converging vertical and horizontal lines present on a tall structure as viewed from
a human perspective on the ground so that they may instead appear parallel to the frame.
The many adjustments possible with a monorail large-format camera require more time to
compose the image than would a simpler, handheld model or digital camera. For photographer Jet
Lowe the process “takes about 15 minutes to set up each shot - measuring the light, loading the
negative and arranging the tripod” which causes him to “[stay] with a subject much longer than most
photographers, analyzing the situation all the more carefully because it takes so long to prepare each
shot.”97 The image is perceived through ground glass rather than reflected through a viewfinder and,
as a result, appears to the photographer exactly as it will become affixed to the film. Lacking an
internal mirror as in other cameras, the ground glass instead presents the image upside down, just as
the camera obscura or the retina of a human eye inverts an image.
Even after the lengthy process of vertical and lateral adjustments and tilts, the image is not
complete upon the release of the shutter. Exposed to light, the silver halide of the film creates a
latent image on the undeveloped sheet. Developing chemicals decompose these halide crystals into
96 James Ewing, Follow the Sun: A Field Guide to Architectural Photography in the Digital Age, 16.
97 Jet Lowe, Industrial Eye, Photographs by Jet Lowe from the Historic American Engineering Record (The Preservation Press,
1986), 9.

52
metallic silver and halogen gas, creating a negative image that can be projected onto light-sensitive
paper to create a positive print.98 Although these developing chemicals are integral to revealing the
image, their subtle residue on the negative and contact paper of the prints risks jeopardizing their
archival longevity. When transmitting such materials to an archive such as the Library of Congress
for storage, contact paper must be “fiber-based rather than resin-coated (RC), and the paper and
negatives [should be] washed in water long enough to remove all processing chemicals.” This
ensures that “archivally stable [color] negatives and contact prints will last at least 100 years.”99 The
silver halide crystals of black-and-white film ensure that properly treated black-and-white negatives
last at least 500 years, as opposed to the faster degradation rate of color dyes. Photographs within
the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress are kept in cold, dry controlled
temperature conditions at Fort Meade, to prevent shrinkage, cracking, expansion, curling, or other
material distortions.100
Widely used for all types of photography prior to the popularity of 35-millimeter film in the
1950s, large-format cameras are no longer actively produced or widely used today. As perspective
control is now more readily available on other types of cameras by way of shift lenses and digital
post-processing, professional large-format film equipment is growing obsolete. The decrease in
production and widespread use of large-format photography reduces accessibility to the equipment
and raises costs of both the equipment and sheet film and development.
Although a more complex system, the digital camera uses the same basic principles as those
of an analog camera, or even the camera obscura. Light enters through the lens, is allowed to reach
the back of the camera upon the strategic release of a shutter, and subsequently encodes the image.
Rather than become encoded on light-sensitive film as in a traditional camera, digital images are
98 Lindsay MacDonald, Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage, 190.
99 John A. Burns, Recording Historic Structures (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004), 56.
100 Jeanette Adams, “Fort Meade is Cool, CALM, and Collected” (2008), 23-24.

53
instead recorded by way of either a charge-coupled device (CCD) or complementary metal-oxidesemiconductor (CMOS) silicon digital sensor. Efforts to make digital cameras more compact,
affordable, and user-friendly mean that “the area of the silicon sensor is usually smaller than the
original film format, and hence wider angle lenses must be used to compensate for this loss of field
of view.”101
The development of a full-frame digital sensor (similar to that of a 35-millimeter film
camera) in 2005 with the release of the Canon 5D was therefore pivotal in influencing professional
photographers to include digital imaging within their practices.102 Prior to this camera and others like
it, digital images generally could not come close to the level of quality captured by film. A digital
single-lens reflex (DSLR), cameras like the Canon 5D “changed the industry with its combination of
a full-frame sensor, speed, price point, and image quality” and despite still harboring a “lamentable
loss in image quality transitioning from large-format film to DSLRs … gains were made in
portability, speed, and a reduced working cost.” 103 Today, comparable professional DSLR cameras
can achieve much higher image quality due to ongoing improvements in sensor technology. In 2018,
a digital camera with a sensor size comparable to a large-format film camera was developed by
LargeSense, though its cumbersome body, low resolution, technical complications, and high cost
made it an inviable option for most photographers.
104 With a 9" x 11" sensor, LargeSense’s LS911
has a pixel size of 75 micrometers (µm) compared to 8.20µm in the Canon5D. Other mediumformat digital sensor backs have since been developed that are more easily portable than the LS911,
such as the PhaseOne IQ4. However, the exceedingly high image resolution of the PhaseOne IQ4
still necessitates a substantial price tag.
101 Lindsay MacDonald, Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage, 381.
102 James Ewing, Follow the Sun: A Field Guide to Architectural Photography in the Digital Age, 17.
103 James Ewing, Follow the Sun: A Field Guide to Architectural Photography in the Digital Age, 17.
104 Richard Brown and Nick Spiker, “LargeSense LS911 Hands-On: The First Digital Large Format Camera” (2021).

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While some digital cameras or smartphone cameras employ electronic shutters that digitally
activate the light-reading capabilities of the sensor, many digital cameras still rely on mechanical
shutters. In either format, the moment the shutter is released on a digital camera is referred to as the
“integration phase,” and entails “the photosensitive elements [of the sensor converting] the
incoming photons into electrical signals, whose amplitudes are directly proportional to the intensity
at each position of the incident light and to the time the sensor is exposed to light.”105 Following this
phase and processing, a patterned grid of pixels is displayed on the camera’s output interface
through the transfer of these processed electrical signals. These pixels are visually dictated through
the process of “incident light [that] causes electrons to be released from their locations in the crystal
lattice of silicon.” As a miniscule square of a single, solid color, the individual appearance of each
pixel within the grid is determined by “the number of electrons released, [as] depend[ing] on the
energy of the incident photons, the characteristics of silicon and (in case of a colour sensor) of the
colour mask, the design of the sensor and the glass filter in front of the image sensor.”106 Recorded
as discrete, numerically quantifiable, electronic raw bitstreams stored on a memory card or tethered
to a hard drive, the image as viewed on the output screen reflects settings for tonal range, exposure,
and color calibration selected by the photographer, as well as limitations and processing capabilities
of the camera itself.
In addition to encoding pixel data, the memory card’s bitstreams encode data that informs
the computer’s operating system as to what file type to use in rendering the image. The most
fundamental form of imaging file is a digital RAW file, which “is a record of the raw sensor data
from the camera, accompanied by some camera-generated metadata.” This raw sensor data is
“simply a record of luminance values at each sensor element or what in essence is a grayscale image.
105 Lindsay MacDonald, Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage, 178-179.
106 Lindsay MacDonald, Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage, 190.

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Additionally, however, what is also recorded in the file are the characteristics of the camera
manufacturer’s color filter array or mosaic (usually arranged in a Bayer pattern) that is applied over
the individual sensor elements.”107 108 Encoding only the foundational pixel data, a RAW image does
not present a scene as it would to a human eye since it precludes adjustments to tonal range and
coloration. When presented to the viewer on an output screen, the luminance values and color filter
data are converted through external software that combines the information into a color image
through a process referred to as demosaicing. Working directly with such a file allows for “changes
over settings like white balance, color temperature, exposure, cropping, etc. [to] be edited
nondestructively through metadata directives rather than through traditional destructive image
manipulations of raster image editing where similar adjustments are irreversibly baked into the pixel
data of rendered file types.”109 Despite the benefits of a RAW file in its embedded metadata
information and nondestructive, parametric editing ability, its inherently proprietary nature - unique
to the camera manufacturer, sensor size and arrangement, and memory storage system - deems it
unpreferable for archiving at repositories like the Library of Congress. While such proprietary files
were considered unsustainable according to the Library of Congress’ Recommended Formats
Statement prior to 2024, the Library now accepts file formats such as Nikon Electronic Format
(NEF), Canon Raw file (CRW), Sony Advanced Raw (ARW), or PhaseOne Intelligent Image Quality
(IIQ).
Faced with fears of over-manipulation that may not present a scene as it appears outside of
the camera’s lens, archival repositories often consider RAW files a trustworthy baseline for
107 Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe, Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS3, 2. As cited in Michael J. Bennett and
F. Barry Wheeler, “Raw as Archival Still Image Format: A Consideration” (2010), 1.
108 A Bayer pattern refers to the color filter array developed by Kodak engineer Bryce Bayer. The array strategically
covers each pixel of a digital image with a red, green, or blue filter to create an overall coloration to the image that
mimics the colors visible to the human eye.
109 Michael J. Bennet and F. Barry Wheeler, “Raw as Archival Still Image Format: A Consideration,” 2.

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comparison since all changes made to an image can be scrutinized and potentially undone. In 2004,
Adobe introduced a solution to the variety of different RAW files emerging on the market in the
form of a “Digital Negative” file, or DNG. Although created by a for-profit company, DNG files
are publicly available and specifically designed to be used as an open-source archival format for
RAW files.110 In transferring a camera’s RAW file to a DNG, conversion software linearizes and
standardizes the sensor data, storing a universally readable version of the data alongside the original
metadata information. Parametric edits made to a DNG file are subsequently embedded within the
file itself as extensible metadata platform (XMP), whereas in a proprietary RAW format they would
be saved as an accompanying “sidecar” file which may require external dependencies, like other
software or equipment, to read. 111 Sidecar data risks becoming lost or separated from the original
RAW file, rendering any correcting edits irretrievable.
While color imagery is common in analog photography, the digital camera offers
unprecedented control over how such colors are rendered. A fully healthy human eye perceives
color through three types of cone cells that individually process red, green, and blue light across a
spectrum of around one hundred different shades. Replicating a like representation of this spectrum
through digital pixels can feasibly only display a subset of all the colors distinguishable by the human
eye. In a camera, this range is “known as its color gamut, and colors outside the gamut must
somehow be mapped onto colors within the gamut.”112 When a camera encodes information as
pixels on a RAW image, it processes such colors and tonality according to the computational
framework of the camera, its sensor, and selected settings, rather than in accordance with color
gamut accuracy. Processing a digital image so that it appears similar to the visual conditions of its
110 “The Public Archival Format for Digital Camera Raw Data”(2024), helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/digitalnegative.html
111 Michael J. Bennet and F. Barry Wheeler, “Raw as Archival Still Image Format: A Consideration,” 2.
112 William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, 101.

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capture requires a series of deliberate alterations. Achieving a natural appearance to an image
through these alterations depends on an understanding of how the human eye perceives color,
which “can be divided into two groups: absolute and relative. Absolute perceptual attributes include
brightness, hue, and colourfulness. These are absolute because there is no need to relate them to the
attributes of other stimuli such as a reference white.”113 Through post-processing software like
Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, each of these individual perceptual attributes can be adjusted
according to the photographer’s intent. Even “relative attributes of colour [which] include lightness,
chroma, and saturation” are easily manipulable, though careful understanding of how these
attributes affect each other is necessary in preventing overprocessing of the pixels or the inadvertent
display of an unnaturally colorized scene.114
In order to present a digital image in a fixed state according to the photographer’s intention,
the RAW file must be converted to one that is more universally readable and includes all performed
edits. For the purposes of this paper, only TIFF (Tag Image File Format), JPEG (Joint Photographic
Experts Group), and PNG (Portable Network Graphic) files will be considered due to their archival
stability identified by the Library of Congress. Images taken with smartphone cameras can capture
JPEG, PNG, or even RAW files, although ensuring that images are encoded in these formats often
requires deliberate specification by the user. Smartphones often default to proprietary image
formats, such as the iPhone’s HEIC files (High Efficiency Image Coding). Often compressed for
better storage and transfer, smartphone images cannot yet achieve the level of quality captured by a
digital camera with a larger sensor, regardless of image file type.
In pursuing the highest quality archival file, TIFF is considered the industry standard due to
its ability to hold numerous “bitmaps represented by a number of different bitstream encodings:
113 Lindsay MacDonald, Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage, 295-296.
114 Lindsay MacDonald, Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage, 295-296.

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uncompressed, compressed using the lossless LZW algorithm, or, for a bitonal image, compressed
using ITU G4 compression.”115 When converting a RAW file to TIFF, “a demosaic algorithm
selected by the [camera] manufacturer is first used to assign color values to each pixel, then
sharpening is applied to counter the softening created by the device’s anti-alias filter. Gamma and
color transformations are then employed in order to put the image in a specific color space, usually
the small gamut sRGB or the slightly larger gamut AdobeRGB.”116 A notable downside that
distinguishes this type of file from the camera’s raw data is that “neither sRGB nor Adobe RGB can
contain all of the colors or dynamic range of the original sensor data. Yet these transformations are
irreversible in the creation of a rendered TIFF file.”117 TIFF is best used when conveying large, highquality images upon which intended color corrections and edits have already been applied to the
reversible data of the RAW file.
Display of images over web-based platforms and those with limited storage capacity often
cannot easily process the large amount of information encoded within a TIFF file. For this reason,
image compression is useful in reducing the size of the file. JPEG and PNG files are both
compressed, although with different types of compression. A PNG file uses a lossless compression
algorithm, which “collapses” redundant information while still allowing for the image to be
decompressed and returned to its original bitstream if desired. For instance, a sequence of “red pixel,
red pixel, red pixel” would be read instead as simply “three red pixels” in lossless compression.118
JPEG files use a lossy compression algorithm, which irreversibly alters the image by discarding
pixels it deems redundant and unnecessary. In doing so, these gaps in information can lead to a loss
of quality that ranges from “barely noticeable to quite pronounced. At any rate, each time a
115 Caroline Arms and Carl Fleischhauer, “Digital Formats: Factors for Sustainability, Functionality, and Quality”
(Society of Imaging Science and Technology, 2005), 222.
116 Michael J. Bennett and F. Barry Wheeler, “Raw as Archival Still Image Format: A Consideration,” 5.
117 Michael J. Bennett and F. Barry Wheeler, “Raw as Archival Still Image Format: A Consideration,” 5.
118 Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 48.

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compressed file is saved, more information is lost, leading to more degradation.”119 Although such
files are more easily readable and transmittable, this inherent loss of quality and limited color bit
depth reduces their usefulness as research tools and jeopardizes their long-term sustainability.
The mechanics of a camera’s lens simultaneously assist in capturing a scene while also
introducing the potential for distortion. More complex than merely a small hole in a surface like the
pinhole of a camera obscura, “modern cameras have a relatively large aperture that admits a bundle
of light rays from each point in the visual field…. to produce a crisp image, a lens is needed to focus
the bundle of light to a point on the sensor…. [which] can cause a number of distortions in the
recorded image.”120 As light passes through the glass of the lens it bends in proportion to its
wavelength, or color, in a property of refraction called Snell’s law. Since different wavelengths of
light bend at different distances, some may miss contact with the sensor and instead be directed in
front of or behind the sensor. This can either cause uniform blurriness throughout the image (axial
chromatic aberration) or result in fringes of color along the edges of the subject (transverse
chromatic aberration).121 While such distortion is preventable without digital alteration - by way of a
different type of lens, narrower aperture, slower shutter speed - post-processing software programs
like Lightroom offer the ability to correct coloration if these choices were unable to be made in the
field. Other aberrations and distortions that stem from the way that light enters the lens, such as
vignetting, are correctable in-camera with the use of a narrower aperture. However, some issues, like
barrel and pincushion distortion, require an upgraded lens to properly correct. If site-specific
conditions or restrictions prevent such corrections at the time of capture, adjusting these minor
distortions during post-processing does not inherently alter the reliability of the scene despite the
fact that they are present within the RAW image.
119 Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography,” 64.
120 Hany Farid, Photo Forensics (MIT Press, 2016), 131.
121 Hany Farid, Photo Forensics, 133.

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An important component of architectural photography, perspective correction is similarly
affected by the type of lens used and is likewise correctable both in-camera and during postprocessing. To imitate the level of control available with an analog monorail camera, some
“professional digital camera systems include shift lenses, but the choices for focal lengths are limited
and the expense of these systems is more than double the cost of a traditional view camera.” 122
Although distortions of perspective are adjustable in programs like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom,
their retroactive adjustment inevitably introduces some degree of speculatory fabrication to the
scene. When considered a tool for analyzing structural measurements, these differences in depiction
can harm the credibility of the image and should be considered according to the viewer’s discretion.
The perspective corrections performed by post-processing software may not identically imitate
corrections performed in the camera, yet they often do not distort the scene so much as to be
unrecognizable or unbelievable as a useful depiction - particularly since an image corrected incamera or captured on film may not be entirely accurate either.
A common tool among digital photographers, High Dynamic Range (HDR) is a seemingly
innocent form of image manipulation that often results in identifiable visual issues. HDR stitches
together a variable set of images of the same scene that are normally exposed, overexposed, and
underexposed, to produce a composite image featuring a large tonal range within the highlights and
shadows. Although believed by some to produce a more natural-looking image due to the range of
detail that exceeds what a single digital shot could typically capture, processing the pixels risks the
removal of entire objects that may have moved from the scene between the capture of each
individual image used for stitching, causing potential irregularities or blatant inaccuracies in the final
product. While some digital alterations are necessary for effectively rendering a scene and correcting
122 Anne Mason and Stephen D. Schafer, “Focus on the Future: Creating Born-Digital Standards for Large-Format
Photography” (Society of Imaging Science and Technology, 2013), 2.

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distortions caused by the transmitting medium of the camera, deliberately imposed mutations - such
as those caused by processes like HDR - push the invalidity of an image to a level that can obstruct
its effectiveness as documentation.
The acknowledgment that some methods of digital post-processing may help to more
accurately render a scene that is inherently distorted by features of the lens, camera, or limitations of
the photographer is not necessarily an endorsement for overprocessing an image to the point of
undeniable inaccuracy. Even grounded in the understanding that no photograph or image can
capture an entirely reliable depiction of reality, the function of architectural documentation depends
on some degree of believability of its trustworthy record of a scene. For this reason, it is essential to
be able to exercise healthy skepticism and recognize evidence of deliberately deceptive
manipulations. Sloppy alterations that cause warping, excessive smoothing, or blatant incongruencies
are often easier to detect than the work of someone highly skilled in image manipulation. Yet even a
skillful edit can be discerned due to errors in shadows, reflections, or conflicting vanishing points.
Careful scrutiny of the direction of cast shadows, locations of attached shadows, coloration of
shadow penumbra under the given environmental conditions, direction of specular reflection, and
identification of the camera’s principle point of capture in relation to objects in the scene can help
reveal subtle alterations.123 While software exists that identifies these issues, visual cross-comparison
between the RAW file and processed image can also disclose differences without the need for
external equipment.
123 Hany Farid, Photo Forensics, 9-75.

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Chapter Three: Case Study – Fotomat Kiosk in Glendale, California
As photography became more accessible to the general public in the mid-twentieth century,
retail labs and kiosks offered a fast and simple way to process undeveloped film. Amid the
concurrent boom of the automobile industry in Southern California, San Diego-based entrepreneur
Preston Fleet created a chain of drive-through photo development kiosks in the late 1960s.124 This
retail chain, called Fotomat, offered overnight developing services. It became architecturally
notorious for simple prefabricated steel structures with vibrant blue-and-yellow pyramidal tiered
roofs, siloed within large parking lots. (Figure 4.1) Its success peaked in the early 1980s with nearly
four thousand North American locations. Yet improvements to developing techniques led to the rise
of one-hour film development labs, which later succumbed to the rise of digital imaging, rendering
Fotomat entirely obsolete by the early 2000s. 125 Today only a few of the iconic huts remain standing,
often converted to other small-scale drive-through franchises or left abandoned.
124 “Obituaries: Preston Fleet, 60; Fotomat Founder” (LA Times, 1995).
125 “Challenges Facing Fotomat” (New York Times, 1981).

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Figure 4. 1: Unknown illustrator, Life magazine Fotomat advertisement, page 17, Jun 25, 1971.

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Emblematic of the cultural shift from film to digital photography, the few remaining
Fotomat buildings represent a bygone age in American society. Although of simple construction, the
distinctive drive-through huts are symbols of a notable boom in public accessibility of photographic
development throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. As such, documentation of these
humble buildings can provide valuable information about the architecture of the drive-through
kiosk, as well as the social custom of overnight film development. One such kiosk is located in the
parking lot of an auto repair shop in Glendale, California. Although currently operating as a drive-up
cigarette and tobacco retail store, the kiosk’s distinctive massing, location, and use of materials
remain the same as its original design.
126 The prominent linearity and coloration of this building
offers an ideal case study for analyzing the differences between film and digital photographic
documentation.127
For the purposes of this comparative analysis, three different professional cameras and a
smartphone camera were used to capture an image from the same vantage point. In compliance with
current federal architectural documentation standards, a large-format Cambo SC monorail camera
with a custom fixed rear standard and Fujinon A f9 240-millimeter (mm) lens was used to capture
the kiosk’s southwest façade in a 5" x 7" black-and-white photograph on Ilford HP5 400 film.
(Figure 4.2) (Figure 4.3) A comparable medium-format digital camera, the PhaseOne IQ4, featuring
a 70mm Rodenstock HR-Digaron-W lens and 54 x 40.5mm sensor that captures 150MP images, was
also used. (Figure 4.4) (Figure 4.5) In 2023, five years after the model was released, the IQ4’s digital
back (which contains the sensor) cost roughly $46,000, the body of the camera cost $7,760, and each
compatible lens cost around $7,000. In contrast, a Cambo SC 5" x 7" is currently available for
126 While Glendale’s cigarette kiosk is currently similar colors as the iconically vibrant Fotomat kiosks, it differs from the
original design in that the cigarette store is painted yellow with a roof that is painted blue with yellow trim. Original
Fotomat buildings were painted blue with a solid yellow roof.
127 Documented for HABS CA-2974 by delineator Jean-Guy Tanner Dubé and photographer Stephen D. Schafer in
2023.

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purchase in only used condition, and it costs roughly $800. Its lenses similarly cost hundreds of
dollars, but the price of auxiliary equipment and rising costs of film and development processes
complicates a simple comparison with digital.
Figure 4. 2: Cambo SC 5" x 7"; Fujinon A 240mm f9 lens; ƒ/32. Photo courtesy of Stephen D. Schafer.

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Figure 4. 3: Stephen D. Schafer, “Orthogonal view of southwest façade, camera height 5′, facing northeast. Fotomat
booth, 246 North Glendale Avenue, Glendale, CA,” 2023, digital scan from film negative, 10633 x 14575 pixels, HABS
CA-2974-6. Photo courtesy of Stephen D. Schafer.

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Figure 4. 4: PhaseOne IQ4; 54 x 40.5 mm sensor; 150 megapixels; 70mm lens. Photo courtesy of Stephen D. Schafer.

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Figure 4. 5: Orthogonal view of southwest façade taken with PhaseOne IQ4; XT Rodenstock HR 70mm f5.6 lens; ISO
50; 1/125 second at ƒ/9; 10652 x 14204 pixels; 4:18 PM February 9, 2024. Photo courtesy of Stephen D. Schafer.

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A more affordable high-quality digital option, the Canon EOS R5 is a mirrorless full-frame
camera with a 36 x 24mm sensor that produces 45MP images.128 (Figure 4.6) To capture a
comparable image of the Fotomat kiosk with this camera, a Canon RF24-105mm F4 L IS USM
zoom lens was used. (Figure 4.7) Upon its release in 2020, the Canon R5’s body alone cost $3,900,
with lens prices ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Four years later, the price
has dropped by nearly $1,000, although this model remains highly regarded as an industry standard. I
visited the Glendale site with my mid-range smartphone camera to capture a similar shot of the
Fotomat’s exterior. (Figure 4.8) Purchased relatively soon after its 2023 release, the Google Pixel 7a
cost roughly $500 and has a camera comparable with those of similar smartphones found in most
people’s pockets today. With a 14.5 x 14.5mm, 64MP sensor and 26mm lens, the compact camera’s
image quality depends on its use of dual-pixel Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF). PDAF means
that the sensor has two photodiodes, one that looks left and one that looks right, which combine to
form a higher-resolution, more focused image. Since it is designed for efficiency and attractiveness,
built-in settings such as auto-HDR and pixel shift can very subtly distort the rendered pixels of the
final image.129 Although smartphones do not allow for precise control over perspective adjustments
at the time of capture, the screen automatically displays a horizontal line that aids in leveling the
image. The image I took attempts to recreate the positioning and perspective of the images taken
with the three professional cameras as closely as possible, but differences are blatant in its coloration
and scale distortion.
128 In contrast to a DSLR, mirrorless cameras display their output image on an electronic viewfinder and are therefore
lighter and more compact.
129 Pixel shift is a technique that rapidly captures multiple images while slightly shifting the position of the sensor, then
merges them together to create a single, higher-resolution image.

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Figure 4. 6: PhaseOne XT IQ4 (left) next to Canon EOS R5 (right). Photo courtesy of Stephen D. Schafer.

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Figure 4. 7: Orthogonal view of southwest façade shot with Canon R5; 36 x 24 mm sensor; 45MP; 24 mm lens. ƒ/11.
ISO 100; February 9, 2024. Photo courtesy of Stephen D. Schafer.

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Figure 4. 8: Orthogonal view of southwest façade shot with Google Pixel 7a; 14.5 x 14.5mm sensor; 5.43mm lens;
1/2370 second at ƒ/1.89; ISO 45; 16.1MP; 3472 x 4624 pixels; 10:06 AM January 19, 2025. Photo by author.

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At a cursory glance, all four images of the Fotomat appear to be satisfactory documentation
of this building. But what if a future researcher wants to use this shot to read the Surgeon General’s
warning of the Parliament advertisement found below the smoke shop’s Open sign? Enlarging the
images reveals visible differences in image quality. (Figure 4.9) While the embedded pixel destruction
of the smartphone image renders the text nearly unreadable, the high resolution of the images
captured by the Canon R5 and PhaseOne IQ4 rival the clarity achieved by the Cambo’s 5" x 7" film.
The finite grid of pixels that composes a digital image was long believed to limit its ability to capture
the same amount of information as film, but recent technological advancements have resulted in the
understanding that “a digital image is still comprised of a finite number of pixels, but at such [high]
resolution it can record much finer detail than was ever possible with traditional photography. This
nullifies the whole distinction between an ‘indefinite amount of information in a continuous-tone
photograph’ and a fixed amount of detail in a digital image.”130 The exceedingly high level of detail
accomplished by the PhaseOne is an undeniable improvement over the Canon R5, but since both
still present a readable and useful image, the steep cost differences in relation to the necessity of
such extreme level of detail must be taken into consideration when establishing minimum resolution
requirements.
130 Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography,” 65.

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Figure 4. 9: Image quality comparison. Graphic by author.
The kiosk’s modest scale makes capturing an orthogonal view of its facade relatively
unchallenging. Even still, the imprecise nature of a smartphone’s handheld camera results in visible
differences when compared to the adjustments made with a shift lens, adjustable digital back, or
monorail film camera. (Figure 4.10) Again, the question must be raised of whether these differences
are too significant to invalidate the image’s usefulness to the viewer. While the prior image I took
was deliberately framed to consider capturing the most accurate orthogonal perspective, another
hastily shot image appears to present the walls of the kiosk as leaning outward where they meet the
roof. (Figure 4.11) Quick snapshots by untrained photographers with smartphone cameras are
common in contemporary architectural survey work; these images do not need to adhere to the
documentation standards set by the federal government for transmittal to the Library of Congress.
Although easy and accessible, smartphone photography by non-professionals is undeniably limiting
in research potential and threatens to reduce the effectiveness of the documentation. The
perspective error of my hasty snapshot can be retroactively corrected even within Google’s photo-

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editing smartphone application. (Figure 4.12) However, not only does this quick edit fail to correct
all of the horizontal and vertical lines equally, but it also causes the building to appear more
elongated and distorted than in its original capture. Such edit conveys a conflicting representation of
the scene to future researchers who may compare my image against one more strategically taken.

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Figure 4. 10: Perspective comparison. Graphic by author.

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Figure 4. 11: Hastily shot view of southwest façade; January 19, 2025. Google Pixel 7a. Photo by author.

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Figure 4. 12: Retroactive in-phone edit of hasty view of southwest façade; Google Photos editing software (left), altered
image (right); January 19, 2025. Google Pixel 7a. Photo by author.
Despite the differences between digital and analog photography, the comparable quality of
contemporary professional digital cameras offers to serve the intended use of architectural
documentation while expanding its base of producers. Digital cameras allow for color to be captured
within a scene without the limitations imposed by color film’s high cost, faster degradation, and
diminishing availability of processing chemicals. While no image, analog or digital, can entirely
replicate reality, the implied “sense of reality which color in a photograph suggests to a layman is
particularly helpful when a scholar or preservationist is trying to explain the character of a historic
building or urban district…. In a balanced study of historic architecture, color cannot be disregarded
even though the medium may be imperfect.”131 Recognizing that perfection, complete accuracy, and
131 Harley J. McKee, Recording Historic Buildings (US National Park Service, 1970), 89.

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a confirmation of eternal stability are inherently unattainable, the aim of contemporary photographic
architectural documentation instead rests in the ability to render a compelling, quality image.

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Chapter Four: Photography and Preservation
“Bear in mind that while a photograph of landscape is merely an amusing toy,
one of early architecture is a precious historical document; and that this
architecture should be taken, not merely when it presents itself under
picturesque general forms, but stone by stone”
- John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1855)
INTERPRETATION OF ARCHITECTURAL DOCUMENTATION
As a vehicle of communication about the visual built environment, photographic
documentation contributes to scholar Evgenii Mikhailovskii’s interpretation of the field of historic
preservation as “the continuous framing and reframing of a visitor’s aesthetic experience of
architecture, such that they would come away with the sense that the building was culturally
important.”132 In attempting to capture the significant elements and most unmanipulated depiction
of a site, architectural documentation similarly serves to emphasize cultural importance through the
lens of the viewers’ distinct experiences. As an extension of memory, the camera was thought to
sustain the life of a destroyed building as early as the mid-nineteenth century, when Ernest Lacan
wrote of the Château de Polignac, “time, revolutions and natural upheavals may destroy them down
to the last stone, but henceforth they will live on in our photograph albums.”133 This apparent
suspension of time bound to tangible remnants of the past forms the basis of studies of both the
photograph and the historic building. Architectural educators Sarah Blankenbaker and Erin Besler
extend de Duve’s claim of a photograph’s ability to “swivel” between its referent and materiality to
likewise apply to the built environment. The historic building, they claim, is both an architectural
object and a depiction of a time now past, noting that “each is an image, a placeholder for
something not present.” Like the essence of a photograph, “This duality creates an essential
132 Jorge Otero-Pailos, “Supplement to OMA’s Preservation Manifesto” (2014).
133 Ernest Lacan, Esquisses Photographiques à propos de l’Exposition Universelle et de la Guerre d’Orient (1856), 29.

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problem: neither can stand uniformly with its referent, nor can either stand alone.”134 A preserved
building depends on both the physical structure and its historic interpretation, without such
collaboration neither would achieve its ultimate cultural value.
Analyzing photographic architectural documentation similarly depends on the materiality of
the photograph and its interpretation by both photographer and viewer. Historian Mark Smith
cautions that “what the modern New Yorker considers a ‘tall’ building is not what the medieval
European peasant considered tall.”135 Architectural documentation that prioritizes context views,
scale markers, or visual evidence of use does not attempt to promote qualifiers such as “tall” in the
same way architectural photography that prioritizes the architects’ design vision may. Instead, these
documentary images allow the viewer to determine for themself whether the building appears tall,
based on as much relevant information as the photographer can successfully capture within the
image’s frame. Although sight’s interpretive qualities have deemed that “neither in science, nor
during a trial, nor at the ‘court of reason’ were photographs ever simply accepted as proof of an
existing state of affairs without an examination of who took the photograph, when, under what
circumstances, and how, [thus dismantling] the naive belief in an immediate reality before our eyes,”
the creation of architectural documentation for the explicit purpose of interpreting historic sites
allows these photographs to be more reliable than those merely taken for visual or artistic
purposes.136
Regardless of reliable intention, a survey photograph cannot wholly capture the true
condition of its moment in history, as “the practice of surveying implies an archival output, which
despite its apparent neutrality, always involves careful selection and therefore a sense that what is
134 Sarah Blankenbaker and Erin Besler, “Neither/Nor: Unfaithful Images in Photography and Preservation,” 2.
135 Mark M. Smith, “Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History”
(2007), 848.
136 Hubertus Amelunxen, Stefan Iglhaut, and Florian Rotzer ed, Photography After Photography: Memory and Representation in
the Digital Age (G+B Arts International, 1996), 22.

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archived is valuable.”137 Faced with the knowledge of posterity, whether in the Library of Congress
or a personal photo album, the photographer makes a series of conscious decisions in order to
capture the most visually successful image, which invariably affect the absolute reliability of the
scene. Writer Susan Sontag decries the documentary capabilities of a photograph by noting:
Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still
haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members
of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s … would
take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied
that they had gotten just the right look on film - the precise expression on the
subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture,
exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one
exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their
subjects.138
Choices made when placing the lens and framing the shot, whether intentional or not, affect the
perspectival qualities of whatever context the image intends to capture. Yet while historic concepts
of objectivity discourage such deliberately framed views, contemporary recognition of the nuances
of experience allow for the photographer’s choices to encourage more intentional interpretations of
sites and their representations while maintaining ties to authenticity.
Simply pointing the lens at a subject and pressing the shutter is often not enough when
attempting to adequately capture a site’s likeness, deeming the photographer’s interventions critical
in creating effective documentation. Michael Lynch, restoration coordinator for the New York State
Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, recounts receiving photographic
documentation of a historic district listed in the National Register of Historic Places for which the
untrained photographers delivered products that were procedurally correct according to labeling and
archiving conventions, yet “the images themselves were unsatisfactory. They were poorly lit (underand overexposed - flash did not fill the full frame); some views were tilted; perspective was not
137 Iñaki Bergera and Jorge Otero-Pailos, “Editors’ Introduction: Photography and Preservation,” v.
138 Susan Sontag, On Photography, 6.

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corrected; and, most disturbing of all, the views photographed did not give a full representation of
the buildings that might be of use to professionals and the interested public.”139 Although the
priority of architectural documentation is to present the subject matter-of-factly, compositional
choices and creative solutions can distinguish an artfully composed image that emphasizes the
cultural importance of a site from one that merely achieves minimum procedural requirements.
For instance, consider the HABS photograph of the Washington Monument. Shot from a
helicopter hovering near the monument to orthographically capture an accurate geometry of the
pyramid’s apex, the photograph in Figure 5.1 offers both a strikingly compelling composition and a
successful example of documentation. Lines from the distant roofline of the John F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts to the right and Arlington Memorial Bridge to the left draw the eye
inward, away from the edges of the photograph. One’s gaze is further carried downward by the
shadowed strip of the Reflecting Pool and parallel Constitution Gardens Pond, which frame the
subject at hand: a clearly focused, properly exposed, pyramidal capstone that pierces the starkly clear
sky. These elements display the photographer’s understanding that “lines can lead a viewer into a
picture, or throw him out of it. They can point to the center of interest, or cause the viewer’s eye to
miss what the photographer had thought was the center of interest.”140 With no details plunged into
obscuring shadow or aggressively overexposed, the high quality of the image allows it to be
enhanced to the degree that tourists are visible within the monument’s observation deck, cars can be
seen on the bridges, and even the outline of Lincoln’s marble perch can be discerned within his
distant memorial building. The image reflects both careful inclusion of elements for research
potential as well as an evident mastery of the components of a compelling image.
139 Michael F. Lynch, “Photographic Documentation” (1987), 6.
140 Jeff Dean, “Photographing Historic Buildings” (1982), 42-43.

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Figure 5. 1: Jack Boucher, “East elevation, from 450' to apex. - Washington Monument, High ground West of Fifteenth
Street, Northwest, between Independence & Constitution Avenues, Washington, District of Columbia, DC,” 1993,
digital scan of film negative, Library of Congress, HABS DC,WASH,2—20,
www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.dc0261.photos/?sp=25&st=text.
Linguistically derived from the Greek words photo, meaning light, and graph, meaning to
draw, photography is highly dependent on the strategic manipulation of light. Beyond even the
physicality of an image embedded into film’s light-sensitive surface, attention to light allows the
photographer to emphasize texture and form. In terms of the built environment, “an illusion of
volumetric three-dimensionality is established through lighting,” as is shown in the depth apparent in
documentation of two industrial furnaces, despite the camera’s proximity to the subject and lack of

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external context.141 (Figure 5.2) As the shadows in the center delve into nearly total darkness, this
contrast with the highlighted furnace faces reinforces the cylindrical form established by the arching
rows of rivets. Strategic lighting further emphasizes the rough patina of the furnace’s peeling paint
through tonal shifts in the different material surfaces. This degree of detail fuels a comprehensive
understanding of the history of the site, with information much more difficult to capture in other
forms of documentation such as architectural drawing.
141 Jeff Dean, “Photographing Historic Buildings,” 43.

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Figure 5. 2: Jet Lowe, “Detail, corroded stairs on stoves to central furnaces. - Central Furnaces, 2650 Broadway, east
bank of Cuyahoga River, Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, OH,” 1979, digital scan of film negative, Library of Congress,
HAER OHIO,18-CLEV,32—33, www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.oh0128.photos/?sp=33.

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Attempts to render material differences can be challenging to accurately record on a single
exposed sheet of film, as “the light absorption characteristics of different surfaces, which may range
from polished metal to dark matte woodwork, could give misleading [light meter] readings.”142
Readings provided by a light meter assist a photographer in determining the correct aperture and
shutter settings required to produce a properly exposed image. In the case of a window handle in the
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Building, the sunlight that illuminates the sash from behind
threatens to obstruct proper exposure of the brass handle. (Figure 5.3) If exposure were calibrated
with regard to the light entering from the window, the dark sash would be plunged deeper into
shadow. Further complicating the image, the darkness of the wooden sash threatens to overexpose
or “blow out” the details of the handle and distant buildings if enough light is allowed to enter the
lens in an attempt to adequately render the details of the wood. By exposing the film to enough light
to capture such a shadowed surface, the highlights of the image will, in turn, become oversaturated
with light and display instead as pure white. With film, a careful balance must be achieved to yield
adequate information about the intended subject on a negative, particularly when situated within its
complex natural environment. The same image is equally complicated to shoot on a digital camera,
though technological advancements offer to ease some of the burden. Largely unable to capture as
great of a tonal range as a film camera, digital eliminates some of film’s complications since light
sensors are incorporated within the body of the camera and post-processing allows for immediate
feedback or corrections.
142 Lindsay MacDonald, Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage, 386.

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Figure 5. 3: “View southeast: brass window handle - Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Building, 1365 Ontario
Street, Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, OH,” 1989, digital scan of film negative, Library of Congress, HABS OHIO,18-
CLEV,43—98, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/oh1582.photos.126221p/.
DEVELOPMENT OF DOCUMENTATION PRACTICE
Photographic process advancements in the latter half of the nineteenth century allowed
photographers to reproduce images they previously could create only once.143 While still
cumbersome and expensive procedures, these inventions increased accessibility and allowed more
people the opportunity to practice photography. Coinciding with the burgeoning study of historic
143 Examples include William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the calotype in 1841, Frederick Scott Archer’s discovery
of the wet-plate collodion process in 1851, and Richard Leach Maddox’s subsequent invention of the gelatin/dry-plate
process in 1871.

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architecture and historic preservation movements in America, this increased accessibility of
photography generated widespread interest in documentation of the historic built environment.
The confluent goals of architectural history and photography in attempting to immortalize
the visual world put photographers “in a superb position to provide the data needed to fulfill [the
revivalism movement of the 1850s].”144 A number of grassroots preservation efforts sprung up
across the United States around this time, though a particularly noteworthy example is The Mount
Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA). Founded in 1853 by Ann Pamela Cunningham, the MVLA
sought to upkeep and provide protection of George Washington’s aging plantation home. Amid an
effort to raise money and spread the word about the efforts of the MVLA, the importance of
photography became evident as early as 1858 when photographer N. S. Bennett inquired with
Cunningham about selling images of the house. Generally distrusting of the profit-driven intentions
of local photographers, it was not until late 1866 that Cunningham agreed to sign a contract with
three photographers, among them noted Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner. Documentary
photography had played a powerful role in disseminating information about the Civil War
nationwide. At the war’s conclusion, Cunningham had become sufficiently convinced by the new
form of media’s ability to likewise spread the word about the MVLA’s cause. Gardner remained
Mount Vernon’s official photographer until 1878, during which time the images and stereographs he
produced helped raise awareness and generate funding for the home’s care and restoration.145
At the turn of the twentieth century American builders begin to consider the inherent value
of extant structures built by early European settlers and, albeit to a lesser extent, works of
Indigenous peoples. As an influx of immigrants and emerging transportation technologies allowed
cities to develop more rapidly, the importance of preserving some elements of the existing built
144 Cervin Robinson and Joel Herschman, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the
Present, 4.
145 “19th-Century Photography at Mount Vernon” (The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 2024).

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environment began to take on more relevance. Photography proved useful in both documenting the
pride of new development and establishing a record of valued spaces that builders hoped to
maintain. Emblematic of this juncture was Boston’s engineering marvel of 1894: the United States’
first subway system. Photographers captured approximately 200,000 negatives of the impressive feat,
including “photographs related to the primary reason for the subway’s undertaking: the preservation
of Boston Common and other beloved downtown landmarks.”146 Taken nearly two decades before
William Sumner Appleton Jr. founded Boston’s (and the country’s) first regional preservation
organization, such photographs documented an unprecedentedly comprehensive account of the
historic built environment.147 The images this endeavor produced were employed both as a technical
record and as legal protection against “the intense public scrutiny aimed at the Boston Transit
Commission.” Support for this theory of motivation is evidenced by “the fact that other American
cities, having witnessed Boston’s successes, did not document their subsequent projects to the same
degree.”148 Considered factual records in a legal context, these images establish the idea that
documentation of the historic built environment is essential to future study because of its ability to
be referenced as reliable sources. A number of similar photographic collections were compiled to a
lesser extent around the country, though no definitive procedures or methodology had yet been
established.
As historic buildings became increasingly lost to development, demolition, and decay, the
need for maintaining some record of their construction and craftsmanship persuaded numerous
local documentation teams. Such records were often intended for use to inspire the re-creation of
146 C. Ian Stevenson, “Proving Preservation: Boston Subway Construction Photography, 1894–1897” (2013), 17.
147 Appleton Jr. founded the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now called Historic New
England.
148 C. Ian Stevenson, “Proving Preservation: Boston Subway Construction Photography, 1894–1897,” 20.

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elements in modern designs or to promote patriotic pride in American architecture.149 An official
regulatory framework for documentation work had not yet been established; nevertheless, these
surveys were born under a similar mentality “of the nineteenth-century impulse to map, control, and
render a wide range of phenomena visible as spectacle … [through] the productive interaction of
epistemological frames and technological possibility.”150 The photograph held a preeminent role
alongside sketches and written descriptions, having overtaken painting in the public perception as
the most faithful method of depicting the reality of a scene. Italian architect and critic Camillo Boito
outlined early procedures for holistically documenting historic buildings in his 1893 text “I Restauri
in Architettura,” published in Questioni Pratiche di Belle Arti, Restauri, Concorsi, Legislazione, Professione,
Insegnamento.
It will be necessary to execute, before an even small work of repair and restoration,
photographs of the monument, then, step by step, photographs of the primary
phases of the work, and finally photographs of the completed work. This series of
photographs will be sent to the Ministry of Public Instruction together with the
drawings of plans, elevations, and details, and, when needed, with watercolors
showing with clarity all the works conserved, consolidated, remade, renewed, altered,
removed, or destroyed. A precise and methodical report of the reasons and the
course of the works and of changes of any kind will accompany the drawings and the
photographs. A copy of all the documents pointed out above will have to be
deposited with the vestry boards of the restored churches or with the office in charge
of the care of the monument.151
Written before such procedures had been definitively established by preservation groups, especially
with regard to photography, Boito’s recognition of the importance of photographs in conjunction
with drawn and written records closely resembles the realities of modern practice.
149 Philadelphia architect and Chair of the American Institute of Architects (AIA)’s Committee on Preservation of
Natural Beauties and Historic Monuments, Horace W. Sellers encouraged the creation of local preservation chapters in
1915 to “document buildings of historic or architectural interest through surveys and photographs of buildings that will
inevitably be demolished in the progress of the City’s development” as a means of emulating the designs and promoting
patriotism. (Paul Hardin Kapp, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South (Univ. Press of Mississippi,
2022), 215.)
150 Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera As Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination 1885-1918 (Duke
University Press, 2012), 3.
151 Camillo Boito and Cesare Birignani, “Restoration in Architecture: First Dialogue” (2009), 81.

92
Historic preservation officially found its way into policies imposed by the United States
federal government in 1906 with President Theodore Roosevelt’s passage of the Antiquities Act. A
decade later, President Woodrow Wilson passed the National Park Service (NPS) Organic Act,
aimed at conserving natural landscapes and wildlife. Neither of these early federal laws fully dictated
protection, maintenance, or stewardship of historic buildings and structures; in fact, the early
National Park Service operated distinctly outside historic framing. Early so-called “Parks Men”
romanticized the rugged, outdoorsy qualities that the job required, citing a disinterest in historic facts
so long as the picturesque landscape remained undisturbed. The first permanent superintendent of
Zion and Bryce National Parks, Eivind T. Scoyen, described the firm distaste many Parks Men had
in sullying the visuals of the NPS sites with historic analysis.
The other day, driving East, we stopped at Frankfort, KY, and we went up to Daniel
Boone’s grave. Now, I would have lost very much of the inspiration, if you choose
to call it that, of my visit to Daniel Boone’s grave if there had been anybody there to
tell me about Daniel Boone or if there had been any museum of Daniel Boone’s
work or any instructor trying to point out his significance in the history of the United
States. Those are some of the things that I just know. I do not know the details. I
know something about Boone. In other words, just to go up there very quietly and
stand in front of the grave of Daniel Boone was enough for me.152
In the first few decades of the twentieth century, tensions grew between Parks Men and the more
polished academics and historians employed by NPS regional offices. Objection to the National
Parks as sites of historic value was expressed even by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who
emphasized that the Parks were meant for “people who appreciate and understand what beautiful
nature plots are…. I don’t think the parks were intended to be classrooms.”153 In the same period,
photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Berenice Abbott were re-envisioning documentary
architectural photography as an artistic practice. A division between beauty and historicism shook
152 Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (University of
Massachusetts Press, 2012), 128.
153 Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History, 122.

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the NPS in the 1920s and ’30s, culminating in the 1933 creation of the Historic American Buildings
Survey (HABS). The United States’ first comprehensive photographic survey, HABS established
documentary architectural photography as a nationwide government endeavor. Chapter five delves
into the history and operation of HABS.
Hired in 1931 as the first chief historian for the National Park Service, Verne Chatelain
sought to steer the mission of the NPS toward interpreting and disseminating an academically
derived narrative of American history to the public. He cited the visual beauty of national parks and
monuments as a vessel for attracting the public and educating them on the sites’ connections to the
developing concept of American history. In a speech prepared for the American Planning and Civic
Association in 1935, Chatelain urged the NPS to take advantage of
the uniquely graphic qualities, which inhere in any area where stirring and
significant events have taken place to drive home to the visitor the meaning of
those events showing not only their importance in themselves but their integral
relationship to the whole history of American development. In other words, the
task is to breathe the breath of life into American history for those to whom it
has been a dull recital of meaningless facts - to recreate for the average citizen
something of the color, the pageantry, and the dignity of our national past.154
The importance of visual imagery in the study of history and architecture bridged the divide between
professional academics and the more experiential Parks Men, particularly in the case of historic
documentation.155
The first assertion of historic preservation policies by the federal government can be found
in the Historic Sites Act of 1935. Dictating that the nation’s historic buildings and landmarks operate
under care of the National Park Service and the Secretary of the Interior, the Historic Sites Act
154 Old History Division Files, WASO, “History and Our National Parks, [June 1935]” as cited in Paul Hardin Kapp,
Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South, 210.
155 Although he did not create the Historic American Buildings Survey, Chatelain proposed a similar survey in August
1933, which took a more commercial approach to the collection of historic data than the HABS program proposed by
Charles Peterson in November of the same year. (Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a
New Genealogy of Public History, 117.)

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referenced the working model of documentation established by HABS two years prior. Ickes
expressed support for the endeavor due to HABS’ recent success in bridging the gap between the
beauty of the parks’ monuments and a comprehensively analytic historic survey.156 Initiated primarily
as a Civil Works Administration (CWA) program under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New
Deal, the documentation efforts of HABS have outlasted any other New Deal-era program, largely
as a result of being written into policies outlined by the Historic Sites Act.157
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s local preservation efforts continued to gain traction,
leading to the establishment of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1949 as a link
between federal efforts and those operating within the private sector. Many American cities were
undergoing urban renewal projects during these postwar years, exposing the need for more stringent
federal preservation regulations as cities began developing at a more rapid pace. The growing supply
of thoughtfully composed and distributable images of American architecture made it possible for the
National Trust to publish a persuasive photographic collection in 1966 titled With Heritage So Rich.
This influential book detailed the loss of significant historic buildings across America alongside a
plan for a preservation program supported by the federal government, the basis of which led to
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s passage of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) on
October 15, 1966.158
The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Architectural and Engineering Documentation
were developed as part of the Historic Preservation Amendment of 1980 and subsequently enacted
by inclusion in the Federal Register in 1983. Two noteworthy changes to documentary practice were
dictated by these Standards: “first, the kind and amount of documentation should be appropriate to
156 Lisa P. Davidson, American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years (National Park Service,
2008), 28.
157 Charles Peterson, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 12.
158 Norman Tyler, Ilene R. Tyler, and Ted J. Ligibel, Historic Preservation: An Introduction to its History, Principles, and Practice
(WW Norton & Company, 2018), 59.

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the nature and significance of the building. Second, the documentation should concentrate on the
features of a building which give it its significance.”159 Emphasis on a building’s significance follows
direction from criteria established to evaluate a site’s inclusion within the National Register of
Historic Places (NRHP), pursuant to the NHPA of 1966. John Burns, former deputy chief and
principal architect of HABS, recounts that the program’s staff at the time of the Standards’
implementation anticipated that “fewer ‘complete’ sets of drawings will be produced; [and]
photographs will be substituted for drawings whenever possible.” Burns continues, “Fewer
measured drawings will mean an increased dependence on photographs for graphic documentation.
Sizing aids such as measuring sticks in photographs will be more common and so will rectified
photographs.”160
The Standards can be concisely summarized as regulations of content, quality, materials, and
presentation. (Appendix #2) Each of the four documentation Standards includes dictation of a
requirement for adequate fulfillment, guidelines for criteria specific to each medium (measured
drawings, photographs, written histories, and field notes), and commentary that justifies or expands
upon the Standard.
Aiming to encourage visually compelling and usable documentation, photography’s
subjective nature and unique qualities of the variety of possible subjects complicates strict regulation
of photographic practice. The first two Standards - Content and Quality - are fairly vague and open
to interpretation. “Content” states only that “Documentation shall adequately explicate and illustrate
what is significant or valuable about the historic building, site, structure or object being
documented” which allows the photographer to tailor techniques of capture to the individual
constraints and opportunities of each distinct building or site.161 The Criteria listed within this
159 John Burns, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 226.
160 John Burns, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 226.
161 Federal Register (Vol. 48, No. 190), 44732.

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Standard describe four levels of detail to be selected in accordance with the significance of the site.
The most stringent level for highly significant sites requires, in addition to a full measured drawing
set and detailed written history, “photographs with large-format negatives of exterior and interior
views.”162
The documentation standard for Quality establishes that HABS documentation “shall be
prepared accurately from reliable sources with limitations clearly stated to permit independent
verification of information,” further specifying that “each view shall be perspective-corrected and
fully captioned.” The commentary included within this Standard admits that “quality is not
something that can be easily prescribed or quantified, but it derives from a process in which
thoroughness and accuracy play a large part.”163 Aligned with evolving notions of objectivity, this
qualifier recognizes that the idea of visual reproduction that wholly relinquishes human intervention
is neither feasible nor necessary in crafting an authentic depiction.
The requirement for “Materials” is straightforward and justified: “documentation shall be
readily reproducible for ease of access; durable for long storage; and in standard sizes for ease of
handling.”164 These requirements are easily applicable to the digital image, since “if there is one thing
that computing technologies are built to do, it’s copying.”165 Even simply rendering a digital image
for view on a screen typically involves copying the data from its storage media onto a screen. It is
only within the criteria and commentary that the problem with digital imagery arises, as the Register
sets a standard of five hundred years for the durability of records. “Ink on mylar [and film are]
believed to meet this standard, while color photography, for example, does not (although color
transparencies are acceptable, their life expectancy is considerably shorter—50 years or less). Field
162 Federal Register (Vol. 48, No. 190), 44732.
163 Federal Register (Vol. 48, No. 190), 44732.
164 Federal Register (Vol. 48, No. 190).
165 Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 58.

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records do not meet this standard but are maintained in the HABS/HAER/HALS collections as a
courtesy to collections patrons.”166 167 The inclusion of color photography did not occur until a 1996
amendment, setting a precedent for amending the Standards to reap the benefits of new media.
Requirements for “Presentation” state only that HABS documentation “shall be clearly and
concisely produced.” Early photographic collections often had lofty ambitions to “photograph
everything that existed and create a universal encyclopedia of images.”168 Yet as the prescription for
concision in the Standards reveals, archivists of our contemporary era “have accepted the
impossibility of keeping everything in the post-custodial age of abundance.”169 By controlling
photographic quantity, collections management ensures that the images included in each survey
adequately represent the site in as concise a manner as possible. This requirement is currently
reinforced by the substantial time and cost associated with film photography, although digital
cameras make capturing a large quantity of images far easier. If digital imaging is allowed within the
collection it may misguidedly appear as though submitting more images will help better represent the
site, which can both overwhelm collections practitioners and obscure the value of individual,
carefully crafted images.
Although a bureaucratic process, amending the Standards and Guidelines is not impossible,
as evidenced by the 1996 amendment mentioned previously and, most recently, an update enacted in
2003. (Appendix #3) Review of their effective use is included within the Standards themselves, as
noted in 1983:
166 Federal Register (Vol. 68, No. 139).
167 The specification for ink on mylar reflects the 2003 update to the Federal Register. HABS Transmittal guidelines
updated on www.nps.gov in August 2024 specify that “Mylar® can be used for sheet sets but vellum is strongly
preferred for its archival stability. Drawings can be drawn on Mylar® archival ink. Drawings that are plotted should use
vellum.” HAER (Historic American Engineering Record) and HALS (Historic American Landscapes Survey) are
introduced later in this chapter.
168 Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera As Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination 1885-1918, 4.
169 Joan Schwartz, “Coming to Terms with Photographs: Descriptive Standards, Linguistic ‘Othering,’ and the Margins
of Archivy,” 159.

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The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation have recently undergone
extensive review and their guidelines made current after 5 years of field use. Users
and other interested parties are encouraged to submit written comments on the
utility of these Standards and Guidelines except for the Rehabilitation Standards
mentioned above. This edition will be thoroughly reviewed by the National Park
Service (including consultation with Federal and State agencies), after the end of its
first full year of use and any necessary modifications will be made. Subsequent
reviews are anticipated as needed.170
The breadth of political fluctuations within the federal government since 1983 and their
ramifications on the ease of alterations to notices within the Federal Register is too complex to
cover within the scope of this analysis. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the intended regular
assessment of the Standards and Guidelines did not occur. Political leaders often trend less favorable
to preservation efforts despite the impressive momentum garnered by the New Deal of the 1930s,
the passage of NHPA in 1966, and the 1980 codification of some provisions outlined by Nixon’s
ambitious, though unsuccessful, Executive Order 11593 of 1971. Reopening the federal record to
amend preservation policies can be met with trepidation from those working within the federal
government.
Beyond the documentation requirements set forth by the NHPA, other environmental
legislation and processes have mitigation measures mandating documentation and care of historic
buildings. Examples include the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) passed in 1969, as well
as comparable environmental review policies at the state and local levels. Some, but not all, of these
policies require documentation in accordance with the Standards. Mitigation documentation in
contemporary practice is frequently used by developers and governing authorities to fulfill historic
preservation requirements before carrying through with a destructive project.
170 Federal Register (Vol. 48, No. 190), 44716.

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TOOLS FOR DIGITAL IMAGE PRESERVATION
As the United States’ oldest federal cultural institution, the Library of Congress has been at
the forefront of efforts to preserve cultural records since its founding in 1800, proving invaluable for
research endeavors worldwide. Concurrent with MIT’s establishment of American professional
architectural education in the 1860s, “the Library began to acquire as well a limited number of
photographs of architectural subjects for reference purposes. From these beginnings in the third
quarter of the nineteenth century grew collections of architectural documents now totaling over a
million items.”171 Provided free and openly to the American public, the Library’s strategic catalog of
such records continues to be an indispensable resource for both professional and recreational
architectural study.
In contrast with federal documentation policies, a forward-thinking approach has been
guiding the Library of Congress’ digital preservation ideology for the past two decades. In July 2000,
the US National Research Council released a report titled “LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library
of Congress.” In December of the same year, Congress passed legislation entrusting the Library with
developing a national program for the preservation of born-digital and surrogate material.172 These
initiatives laid the foundation for the creation of the Library’s National Digital Information
Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), officially established in 2004. The efforts of the
NDIIPP echo concerns about architectural preservation and documentation endeavors.
Never has access to information that is authentic, reliable, and complete been more
important, and never has the capacity of libraries and other heritage institutions to
guarantee that access been in greater jeopardy. Recognizing the value that the
preservation of past knowledge has played in the creativity and innovation of the
nation, the U.S. Congress seeks, through the Library of Congress, to find solutions
171 C. Ford Peatross, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 242.
172 Patricia Cruse and Beth Sandore, “Introduction: the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure
and Preservation Program” (2009), 301.

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to the challenges posed by capturing and preserving digital information of cultural
and social significance.173
While preserving digital information was initially addressed with a similar mentality to other archival
procedures, “over the course of the NDIIPP program [occurred] the gradual and shared realization
that preservation as a function exists along the continuum of access to content…. digital
preservation actually means, in many instances, the process of ensuring sustainable access over
time.”174 Rather than attempt to encase digital information within an archival collection like other
material records, efforts shifted to the continual adaptation and upgrading of digital files in
concurrence with the evolution of technology.
Having revolutionized the contemporary world in its seemingly easy and instantaneous
ability to automate previously manual work, digital preservation appears to be a simple problem for
computers to solve. The automated nature of computing has been “sold to us as clean, efficient, and
nearly perfect logical mechanisms.”175 Many are under the misguided assumption that the solution to
digital preservation could be devised of similar rationality. However, according to Trevor Owens,
head of digital content management at the Library of Congress, “experience teaches us that
computers are very much a part of the messiness we know so well from our analog world.”176 No
matter how far computing and artificial intelligence appear to have surpassed human ability, Owens
emphasizes that “machines alone cannot accomplish digital preservation. Digital preservation
requires the work of craftspeople who reflexively approach digital preservation problems in situ and
develop approaches that match the resource, material, and conceptual constraints of a given
173 Librarian of Congress James Billington quoted in Patricia Cruse and Beth Sandore, “Introduction: the Library of
Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program,” 302.
174 Patricia Cruse and Beth Sandore, “Introduction: the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure
and Preservation Program,” 306.
175 Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 72.
176 Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 72.

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setting.”177 These problems typically relate to differences in file formats, their metadata, and any
rendering hardware, operating system, or software that may jeopardize the image’s long-term
sustainability as a result of either planned or unexpected computing obsolescence.
Since 2004, the Library of Congress has maintained a regularly updated website with
information about digital format sustainability factors, aimed at advising measures of best practice
and anticipating protections against such obsolescence.178 They define formats as “packages of
information that can be stored as data files or sent via network as data streams (aka bitstreams, byte
streams).”179 As of May 22, 2024, there are seventy-two distinct format extensions categories listed
for still image files, excluding the multiplicity of versions and subtypes that have developed over
time for each category. Only DNG, JPEG, TIFF, and PNG are non-proprietary formats currently
recommended by the Library for long-term sustainability.180 Although all can render the same image,
each format offers its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of image compression, resolution,
color variation, size, and platform compatibility.
Formats further differ in the degree of specificity embedded within their metadata. When
dealing with visual imagery, the tendency toward “screen essentialism” reflects the ocular-dominance
177 Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 73.
178 “1.) Disclosure. Degree to which complete specifications and tools for validating technical integrity exist and are
accessible to those creating and sustaining digital content. A spectrum of disclosure levels can be observed for digital
formats. What is most significant is not approval by a recognized standards body, but the existence of complete
documentation. 2.) Adoption. Degree to which the format is already used by the primary creators, disseminators, or
users of information resources. This includes use as a master format, for delivery to end users, and as a means of
interchange between systems. 3.) Transparency. Degree to which the digital representation is open to direct analysis with
basic tools, such as human readability using a text-only editor. 4.) Self-documentation. Self-documenting digital objects
contain basic descriptive, technical, and other administrative metadata. 5.) External Dependencies. Degree to which a
particular format depends on particular hardware, operating system, or software for rendering or use and the predicted
complexity of dealing with those dependencies in future technical environments. 6.) Impact of Patents. Degree to which
the ability of archival institutions to sustain content in a format will be inhibited by patents. 7.) Technical Protection
Mechanisms. Implementation of mechanisms such as encryption that prevent the preservation of content by a trusted
repository.” (“Formats, Evaluation Factors, and Relationships,”
www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/intro/format_eval_rel.shtml)
179 “Formats, Evaluation Factors, and Relationships,”
www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/intro/format_eval_rel.shtml
180 LOC Recommended Formats Statement, 2023-2024.

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that prevails in our image-based society. Yet nested within the layers of computing platforms
required to render the resulting image on the screen are valuable pieces of information.181 This
metadata can include both technical information inscribed automatically by the camera or
descriptive data added manually by the photographer after the image is created, the degree to which
is largely determined by the image format.182 Operating on this level of specificity reveals an
overwhelmingly complex amount of embedded information to the average viewer, and “if the sheer
volume of detailed administrative metadata were not daunting enough, the overlap and gaps between
the related standards make them difficult to implement within any repository system.”183 However,
for a well-established digital repository such as that at the Library of Congress, this metadata proves
invaluable in supplementing documentary information about the site depicted and intricacies of its
capture.
In developing a digital preservation strategy, the Library of Congress both gains insight from
and influences other developing frameworks of similar intent. Having since emerged as a global
leader in the field, the Library of Congress remains at the forefront of digital preservation efforts. As
a whole, however, widespread digital preservation remains a largely disjointed, localized
phenomenon in which individual organizations develop their own strategies of best fit. Surveys of
the digital practices being implemented at libraries and archival institutions have found that “there
seems to be a significant disconnect between what the [digital preservation] community is saying and
what is actually happening on the ground. There may even be skepticism in the community that
collaborative preservation is valuable and possible.”184 Through efforts by the NDIIPP and other
Library preservation endeavors, a set of guidelines have been developed for the digital records of US
181 ‘Screen Essentialism’ was coined by Nick Montfort in “Continuous Paper: MLA” (2004) and describes the common
misattribution to digital media with their presentation on computer screens.
182 Lindsay MacDonald, Digital Heritage: Applying Digital Imaging to Cultural Heritage, 266.
183 Jane Johnson Otto, “Administrative Metadata for Long-Term Preservation and Management of Resources” (2014), 5.
184 Jane Johnson Otto, “Administrative Metadata for Long-Term Preservation and Management of Resources,” 22.

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federal organizations based on frameworks put forth by reference models such as the Open Archival
Information System Reference Model (OAIS), Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification
(TRAC), and Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS).185
The OAIS model was originally developed for the international Consultative Committee for
Space Data Systems in 2005; it has since become widely accepted as the primary standard for longterm preservation of digital data repositories. Used by both the Library of Congress and the
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in the US, this model serves as the basis of
digital preservation efforts by large federal repositories abroad such as the British Library,
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the National Library of the Netherlands. OAIS relates
primarily to the formation of “a taxonomy of information objects and packages for archived objects,
as well as the structure of their associated metadata.”186 In doing so, the model concerns itself with
three distinct types of digital information packages: those that are received, those that are stored, and
those that are subsequently sent out - called SIPs (Submission Information Packages), AIPs
(Archival Information Packages), and DIPs (Dissemination Information Packages).187 Models such
as OAIS are not entities or types of software that carry out the task of preservation, but rather
policies that accommodate the evolutionary nature of technological advances as they are applied to
an archival environment.
Where OAIS relates to the functional activities of a digital archive, other frameworks build
off this model in establishing standards for individual archival characteristics. For instance, TRAC
was developed in part by NARA to document metrics of trustworthiness in the records of a given
digital repository.188 PREMIS, on the other hand, is similarly founded in the OAIS reference model
185 Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 79.
186 “Term: Open archival information system (OAIS),” www.digitizationguidelines.gov/term.php?term=oais
187 Anthony Cocciolo, “Challenges to Born-Digital Institutional Archiving: the Case of a New York Art Museum”
(2014), 239.
188 Anthony Cocciolo, “Challenges to Born-Digital Institutional Archiving: the Case of a New York Art Museum,” 239.

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but directly relates to the information required to accompany digital items within a library repository.
Developed by the Online Computer Library Center and the Research Libraries Group, the Data
Dictionary for Preservation Metadata was released in 2005 to establish a shared community
metadata standard to accompany digital data intended for long-term preservation. Conjunction of
these frameworks helps to build a guiding practice for the creation of future digital records stored in
repositories like the Library of Congress.
By combining features of these models, the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative
(FADGI) was established in 2007 for the regulation of records produced by US federal agencies. A
voluntary, collaborative effort, FADGI welcomes “all United States federal agencies and institutions
involved in the creation or collection of digitized or born digital content of a cultural, historical, or
archival nature.”189 Broken into two specialized working groups, FADGI focuses on either Still
Image records or Audio-Visual records, such as moving pictures and films. The born-digital and
surrogate images to which FADGI applies must be created within a controlled environment, as a
primary purpose of the Initiative is to “provide the public with a product of uniform quality.” 190
These images include copies of materials such as textual content, maps, photographic prints, and
negatives, yet they exclude photographs taken outside the studio for the purpose of architectural
documentation since qualities such as color and lighting cannot be controlled in the field. In contrast
with other archival material, photographs of architecture cannot be produced in a controlled
environment, no matter how close to a uniformly accurate depiction the photographer attempts to
achieve.
189 “About” (FADGI, 2023), www.digitizationguidelines.gov/about.
190 “Still Image Working Group” (FADGI, 2023), www.digitizationguidelines.gov/still-image.

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Chapter Five: Photography for the Heritage Documentation Programs
“It is the responsibility of the American people that if the great number of our
antique buildings must disappear through economic causes, they should not pass
into unrecorded oblivion.” – HABS proposal (1933)
ORIGINS OF THE PROGRAM
As noted previously, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Historic American
Buildings Survey (HABS) in 1933 as one of his New Deal programs. HABS was formally
administered under the National Industrial Recovery Act and subsequent Civil Works
Administration (CWA) established the same year by Executive Order 6420-B.191 These federal job
creation programs sought to bring otherwise un- or under-employed architects, historians, and
draftsmen to the National Park Service in unprecedented numbers. Charles Peterson, a young
landscape architect from Minnesota, served as chief of the Eastern Division of the Park Service
Branch of Planning when the implementation of the CWA prompted a call for proposals to be sent
to federal agencies in November 1933. Inspired by his architectural training and the work of
colleagues at Colonial Williamsburg, on which Peterson had worked tangentially since 1930, he saw
immense value in the “desire to study and preserve early architectural forms as a means of
understanding our past.”192 Peterson had been displeased with NPS chief historian Verne Chatelain’s
approach of cataloging only those historic sites that proved useful for constructing a narrative of
American history or provided commercial benefit to the National parks.193 The proposal Peterson
submitted for the creation of HABS specifically outlined a survey unlike that of the bureaucracy of
typical federal programs.
191 Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, “Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 6420-B—Establishing the Federal
Civil Works Administration.”
192 Catherine C. Lavoie, “Architectural Plans and Visions: The Early HABS Program and Its Documentation of
Vernacular Architecture” (2006), 18.
193 Paul Hardin Kapp, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South, 212.

106
With the rapid loss of America’s historic buildings and disparate survey efforts across
various regions, the need for a singular, federally implemented architectural survey became apparent.
While Chatelain’s perspective on the role of history within the NPS likewise supported the necessity
of a retrospective architectural survey, Peterson sought to uphold the Park Service’s mission by
identifying “the presence of ‘thematic gaps in the system’ that must be filled if the agency is to create
‘a system that works for all.’”
194 For Peterson, the collection and availability of data on historic
buildings exceeded the importance of constructing an orchestrated narrative of American history
dictated by a small group of professional, White male historians. This perspective set the basis for
the program as one of comprehensive, quasi-objectivity, despite the similarly privileged social
position of NPS architects, who were subsequently employed to work on HABS. Vernacular
structures were given equal attention as monumental buildings in the compilation of what Peterson
refers to in the original proposal as a “complete resume of the builders’ art.”195 Such a seemingly
scientific approach appealed to the sensibilities of Secretary of the Interior Ickes, who approved the
proposal alongside that of the Federal Relief Administration on December 1, 1933.
Not alone in his efforts to initiate a comprehensive survey program, Peterson gained support
from others within the federal government who contributed to persuading Ickes of the need for its
creation. One such influential figure was the chief of the Division of Fine Arts at the Library of
Congress, Leicester B. Holland, who had proposed a similar survey to the American Institute of
Architects (AIA) in 1918 as a member of its Committee on the Preservation of Historic Buildings.196
Budget limitations prevented this endeavor from being implemented until Holland established the
1929 collection, Pictorial Archives of Early American Architecture (PAEAA), under his jurisdiction
194 Denis P. Galvin, John Fahey, Belinda Faustinos, Gretchen Long, Jerry L. Rogers, and Margaret Wheatley, Future
Shape of the National Park System Committee Report: A System that Works for All, as cited in John H. Sprinkle Jr., Crafting
Preservation Criteria: The National Register of Historic Places and American Historic Preservation (Routledge, 2014), 26.
195 HABS, “Bulletin No. 1” (1933).
196 Paul Hardin Kapp, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South, 218.

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at the Library of Congress.197 Merely an archival collection of previously taken photographic
negatives, PAEAA did not have any means of regulating the creation of the approximately ten
thousand images collected during its most active period from 1930 to 1938. For this reason, Holland
saw the participatory nature and ability to standardize the actively growing HABS collection as a
natural extension of his prior survey attempts.198
The Historic American Buildings Survey proved unique for its time in its ambitious goal of
comprehensive documentation of the historic built environment, as well as its approach to methods
of recordation.199 Despite Peterson’s vision for the program as that of a scientific chronicle of
building typologies, the CWA’s allotment of $448,000 for the implementation of HABS “was
classified as a ‘cultural program,’ a work initiative designed for professionals in artistic and literary
fields.”200 Circular No. 1 provides a detailed description of the subject and type of structure intended
for documentation, yet techniques of capture are less strictly prescribed. Still, the need for each
photographer to supply their own large-format photographic equipment meant that only a select
group of preestablished professionals could feasibly participate. The circular’s section titled
“Photographic Work” states:
Provision is being made for photographic work to supplement the drawings. It is
planned to enlist the services of unemployed photographers at the rate of $1.00 per
hour. Each photographer would furnish his own camera (5" x 7" size mandatory)
with cut film provided free by the government. He will be reimbursed a standard rate
(say) 10¢ for developing each negative, making one glossy print and turning both
over into the possession of the government. This activity will follow the beginning of
the measuring program by some weeks.
197 Catherine C. Lavoie, “Architectural Plans and Visions: The Early HABS Program and Its Documentation of
Vernacular Architecture,” 15.
198 Wilton Claude Corkern Jr., Architects, Preservationists, and the New Deal: the Historic American Buildings Survey, 1933-1942
(George Washington University, 1984), 8.
199 The early program intended only to document architecture constructed pre-1860, and clarified that, “absolute priority
will be given to buildings … which have not been restored or remodeled and which are in imminent danger of
destruction or material alteration.” (“HABS Bulletin No. 3” as cited in John H. Sprinkle Jr., Crafting Preservation Criteria:
The National Register of Historic Places and American Historic Preservation, 30.)
200 Paul Hardin Kapp, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South, 215.

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This material can be supplemented by the open purchase of photographic prints only
of pertinent subjects made from high quality negatives. This is to encourage the use
of the camera by the individuals in squads. For uniformity of results only two sizes
will be purchased 3½" x 5½" and 5" x 7". A standard price will be paid for each
size.201
The proposal for HABS envisioned a more complete survey of American architecture than
had previously been conducted by regional efforts. Most surveys of the time relied predominantly on
photographs, illustrations, and drawings with very little historic written information.202 The initial
HABS workflow involved the creation of Outline Summary index cards documenting brief
information about all identified historic resources before more extensive measurement-based
drafting and photographic documentation took place. The program identified specific styles of early
American architecture that were most important to document, but
so important was a comprehensive approach to chief architect Thomas Vint that
he insisted the Outline Summaries address all typical and significant forms
whether or not they were among those actually recorded by HABS. The intent
was that the volumes be informative rather than illustrative. The essays rather
than the drawings and photographs were to be the focus.203
However, the relatively recent development of the fields of both architectural history and American
history at large cornered HABS historians and researchers into relying predominantly on illustrative
folio volumes of drawings and photographs regardless.
204
Initially intended as only a ten week program, extended to six-months, HABS later became
permanent through a memorandum of agreement signed on July 2, 1934 by the National Park
Service, the American Institute of Architects, and the Library of Congress. Each entity held a
specific role in the program.
201 United States Department of the Interior, “HABS Circular No. l.”
202 Catherine C. Lavoie, American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years, 20.
203 Catherine C. Lavoie, “Architectural Plans and Visions: The Early HABS Program and Its Documentation of
Vernacular Architecture,” 25.
204 Catherine C. Lavoie, “Architectural Plans and Visions: The Early HABS Program and Its Documentation of
Vernacular Architecture,” 23.

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The American Institute of Architects, through each of its sixty-seven chapters,
had the responsibility of identifying and cataloging structures built before 1875
whose architectural merit or historical association made them a significant part of
the cultural heritage of the United States. The Park Service would carry out the
actual work of preparing measured drawings and taking photographs. The Fine
Arts Division of the Library of Congress agreed to serve as the repository for the
HABS inventory forms, drawings, and photographs.205
During the first phase of HABS activity, prior to the conclusion of most New Deal programs in
1941, “photography [was] the component best represented. As district officers saw HABS funding
coming to an end, they made a concerted effort to see that photographs, at least, were part of site
documentation.”206 Documenting over six thousand sites around the country, HABS teams (known
as squads) produced 23,765 sheets of drawings and 25,357 photographs by the conclusion of the
first phase in 1941, with photographs continuing to outnumber drawings to this day.
207 A more
rapidly produced and broadly legible form of documentation, photographs maintained a prominent
place in the early HABS collection despite chief architect Thomas Vint’s initial intentions.
Vint’s loose photographic standards in Circular No. 1 were clarified the following month in
the release of HABS Bulletin #11 on January 8, 1934. John O’Neill, architect at the Branch of Plans
and Designs in Washington, D.C., outlined the need for at least two black-and-white views of a
building, featuring a one-foot rule for scale, to be taken of each project measured by HABS squads.
Intent on the purpose of photographs as tools for scientific documentation, the bulletin emphasized
that it was “more important that [photographs] be clear and sharp in their delineation of detail than
that they be artistically composed or effective from a pictorial point of view.”208 Regardless of the
205 Harlan D. Unrau and G. Frank Williss, “To Preserve the Nation's Past: The Growth of Historic Preservation in the
National Park Service during the 1930s” (1987), 29.
206 Catherine C. Lavoie, “Architectural Plans and Visions: The Early HABS Program and Its Documentation of
Vernacular Architecture,” 31.
207 “Annual Report of the Director of the National Park Service: 1941” as cited in Harlan D. Unrau and G. Frank
Williss, “To Preserve the Nation's Past: The Growth of Historic Preservation in the National Park Service during the
1930s,” 29.
208 HABS Bulletin No. 11 (1934).

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intent at mechanic objectivity, photographers who supplied images for the Survey were generally
skilled artisans who “understood the building, [were] familiar with principles of composition, and
knew how to use natural lighting to create a dramatic image.”209, 210 In these subtle but deliberate
choices, early HABS photographs were often able to serve both as reliable documentation as well as
striking representations of the majesty of early American architecture.
Whenever trained photographers were unable to fill their role within a HABS squad, due to
budgetary constraints or logistical considerations, the architects and historians conducting the survey
picked up the camera instead.211 Charles Peterson himself served as the photographer for a Louisiana
survey in 1938.212 Yet despite the representational similarities between those encouraged by a Beaux
Arts architectural education and the compositional choices of those trained in photography, not all
architects proved adept at creating adequate photographic documentation. Maine’s HABS district
officer, architect Josiah T. Tubby, stepped into the role of photographer around 1937 when budget
cuts led to the loss of the primary squad photographer, Allen L. Hubbard.213 Many images that Mr.
Tubby produced reveal inexperience, clumsiness, and overall disregard for the careful intricacies of
photographic documentation. While his work is generally satisfactory in capturing the intended
subject, Mr. Tubby’s photographs do not include the building serial numbers, nor scales, required of
HABS photography as described in Bulletin #11.
Compared to other images created for the survey, Mr. Tubby’s photographs often
insufficiently frame the building they intend to document, cutting off significant architectural
elements and reducing the usefulness of the image. For instance, his documentation of the
209 John A. Burns, Recording Historic Structures, 59.
210 Some 1930s-era photographers include: Arthur C Haskell; C. C. Woodburn; E. H. Pickering; Richard Koch; John
Brostrup; Alex Bush; Charles Peterson; W. N. Manning; C. Moran; E. W. Russell; E. J. Stein; Roger Sturtevant; E. O.
Taylor; and Allen L. Hubbard.
211 Catherine C. Lavoie, American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years, 17.
212 HABS LA,49-OPEL.V,1-2.
213 Lisa P. Davidson and Martin J. Perschler, “The Historic American Building Survey During the New Deal Era,” 64.

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southwest elevation of the James Kavanagh House not only obscures information about the upper
roof and chimneys, but it also fails to capture the entire massing of the back half of the building.
(Figure 6.1) Had Mr. Tubby positioned the camera a step to his left, he may have further avoided the
branches obstructing information about the upper-right windows on the house’s primary facade. Mr.
Tubby’s detail shots similarly fail to provide an ideal view of the intended subject. Off-center,
unlevel, and shrouded in shadow with nearly half the frame filled by grass, his image of the Walpole
Meeting House does in fact capture the building’s doorway. (Figure 6.2) However, any information
that may have been captured about the surrounding structure, if the image had been properly framed
and shadows more thoughtfully considered, are lost.
Figure 6. 1: Josiah T. Tubby, “South West Elevation - James Kavanagh House, 35 Pond Road, Damariscotta Mills,
Lincoln County, ME,” 1936, digital scan from film negative, Library of Congress, HABS ME,8-DAMARM,1—2,
www.loc.gov/pictures/item/me0085.photos.088352p/.

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Figure 6. 2: Josiah T. Tubby, “Detail of Southwest Entrance (Front) - Walpole Meeting House, State Route 129,
Walpole, Lincoln County, ME,” 1936, digital scan of film negative, Library of Congress, HABS ME,8-WALP,1—13,
www.loc.gov/pictures/item/me0097.photos.088402p/.

113
Following the end of most New Deal-era programs around the beginning of the United
States’ entry into World War II, HABS was sustained through the 1950s only by work from regional
NPS offices and donations from former district officers, members of the AIA, and universities.214
Peterson left HABS in 1936 to work in St. Louis, Missouri as a senior landscape architect for the
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Yet he continued recording ventures similar to that of the
Survey at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
215 Upon the revival of HABS, the
estimate in 1938 of roughly fourteen thousand American structures deemed worthy of
documentation according to HABS criteria increased to over three million, due to the adoption of
criteria to include buildings built as recently as fifty years prior, as opposed to only those predating
1860.
The increase of historic material, coupled with the threat of widespread demolition as a
result of urban renewal and highway construction in the 1950s, brought a new urgency to the Survey
project. It was largely funded by the Park Service’s 1956 “Mission 66” program, of which Thomas
Vint, then Chief of NPS Planning and Design, served as a member of the committee that oversaw
all proposals. He stated, “the idea of completing the survey was presented in terms of promptly
recording historic buildings before ‘adequate information ... [is] lost forever.’”
216 What is notable
about this period, although a briefly held mentality, is the notion that the Survey was an endeavor
that could be “completed.” The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 further legitimized the
role of HABS in the nation’s future historic preservation projects, establishing the need for its
sustained inclusion in the field. Following the NHPA, HABS was no longer considered a
“completable” Survey, but rather (what Peterson refers to in 1983) as an “open-ended archive.” 217
214 Catherine C. Lavoie, American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years, 13.
215 Robert Bruegmann, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 215.
216 Lisa P. Davidson, American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years, 34.
217 Charles Peterson, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 16-17.

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Despite its revival and renewed funding, HABS no longer benefitted from the abundance of
squad personnel supplied by the CWA. Many young professional architects at the time did not
possess the design skills or knowledge of history needed to complete HABS documentation to the
same quality as early delineators, due to widespread academic re-envisioning of architectural
education according to Modernist principles.218 This resulted in dry, uniformly drafted compositions
in stark contrast to the artful delineation that stemmed from the early Survey’s lenient instruction,
which many early squads even largely disregarded. Rather than depend entirely on this new
generation of indoctrinated modern architects, “every effort was made [by HABS] to locate bright
students not yet brainwashed by the stern idealogues of the International Style.” 219 Seasoned HABS
draftsmen were convinced of the potential benefits that came with student work, having witnessed
the success of Peterson’s project at Independence Hall - which had to rely on summer teams of
students too young to be drafted for service in World War II. 220
HABS operations of the 1960s changed not only in terms of staffing and production quality,
but also in regard to the purpose of the Survey itself. The NHPA, among other goals, recognized the
need for an expanded register of historic sites beyond the collection identified by 1935’s Historic
Sites Act, broadening the scope beyond national significance to include sites significant at the state
and local level. In establishing the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), the NHPA fulfilled
the role of HABS as a survey, allowing the program to instead “focus on its core mission [of]
producing and making available to the public documentation of significant architectural
resources.”221 Section 106 of the Act dictates that documentation of historic sites owned or funded
by the federal government be conducted prior to any proposed alterations or demolition projects.
218 Robert Bruegmann, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 216.
219 Charles Peterson, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 21.
220 Charles Peterson, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 12.
221 Virginia B. Price and James A. Jacobs, American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years, 47.

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Yet the Standards for documentation as we understand them today were not added until the 1983
amendment nearly two decades later.
NHPA legislation encouraged increased professionalization of preservation programs and
the study of architectural history as a whole.222 In with the postwar era of economic and industrial
expansion, greater attention was paid to the history of engineering processes within the built
environment. Although HABS had always included infrastructure such as bridges, lighthouses, and
factories, the need to document a more detailed analysis of such processes’ inner workings became
evident. On January 10, 1969, the Historic American Engineering Survey (HAER) was established to
operate alongside HABS, focused specifically on recording the intricacies of the nation's engineering
achievements. While HABS was created as a tripartite agreement between the LOC, NPS, and AIA,
HAER was born of an agreement between LOC, NPS, and a group of engineering societies
including the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the American Institute of Mining,
Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers. HAER was briefly consolidated into a single department
with HABS in 1973, forming the NPS Assistant Directorate for Archaeology and Historic
Preservation. Three years later, the two once again became separate entities within the Office of
Archaeology and Historic Preservation.
During this period, HABS/HAER documentation programs underwent a seesaw of
departmental and name changes. On January 25, 1978, then-Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus
mandated that HABS/HAER be once again consolidated into one program and retitled the National
Architectural and Engineering Record (NAER). NAER was subsequently removed from official
NPS jurisdiction and transferred to the Department of the Interior as part of the Heritage
222 Virginia B. Price and James A. Jacobs, American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years, 47.

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Conservation and Recreation Service (HCRS).223 Three years later, James G. Watt, Secretary of the
Interior under President Ronald Reagan, abolished the HCRS with the passage of Secretarial Order
3060 and returned NAER to the NPS Associate Directorate for Archaeology and Historic
Preservation.224 The following year, the program was again retitled HABS/HAER and assigned to
the NPS Associate Directorate for National Register Programs. Activities within the program
remained strong throughout the departmental shuffles, though its reorganization illustrates what
Peterson describes as “a large and forgetful bureaucracy [in which]… HABS has been able to survive
only by good luck as it staggers from one Interior Department reorganization to another.” 225
Coupled with the regulatory nature of the NHPA, these changes signify an embedded politically and
functionally stringent aspect of the program’s operation that had not existed in the Survey’s early
days.
It was in this bureaucratic climate that the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards and
Guidelines for Architectural and Engineering Documentation were born, seventeen years after the
Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties were set forth by the
NHPA. Issued into the Federal Register on September 29, 1983, the newer Standards require that
documentation adequately displays the valuable aspects of a building or site; is prepared from
reliable sources; is stored on durable, reproducible material to last at least five hundred years in the
Library of Congress, and is presented in a clear, concise manner.226 Expanding upon the guidance
provided by the original HABS bulletins released by O’Neill and his team in 1934 and subsequent
internal NPS manuals, these four Standards cemented existing judgments of documentary reliability
into procedure. In contrast to the regulatory nature of the Standards, their accompanying Guidelines
223 Pursuant to Section 2 of Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1950.
224 “Getting (Re)Organized” (National Park Service, 2007),
www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/mackintosh5/chap1.htm
225 Charles Peterson, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 7.
226 Federal Register (Vol. 48, No. 190), 44731-34.

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are intended to provide practical advice. They outline distinct levels of documentation required,
depending on a site’s assessed cultural values in combination with the reason for recording. The
more flexible nature of the Guidelines have allowed for a number of updates over the years, the
most recent on July 21, 2003.227 Notable changes to photographic procedure from the 1983
guidelines to the most recent include accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act, inclusion of color
transparency film to accompany one identical black-and-white negative and print, and instructions
for submission of field record (non-archival) 35mm negatives and contact sheets.
The most recent major update to the program was in 2000, when another tripartite
agreement - this time between the Library of Congress, National Park Service, and American Society
of Landscape Architects (ASLA) – laid the groundwork the Historic American Landscapes Survey
(HALS).228 This new program was based on the work of previous surveys of historic landscapes,
such as HABS’ early Historic American Landscape and Garden Project of 1935-40 and the
Landscape Initiative undertaken by NPS in 1985. HALS was initially proposed with no funding. In
2001, a $20,000 grant from NPS’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training
(NCPTT) allowed the program to temporarily hire designated landscape architects and consultants,
as well as compile their own guidelines for documentation, released in 2005.229 It was not until 2010
that HALS was instituted as a permanent federal program. Though tailored to landscape
documentation, HALS guidelines abide by the similar photographic requirements as those of HABS
and HAER.
Today these three documentation programs, HABS, HAER, and HALS, are overseen by one
department within the NPS called Heritage Documentation Programs (HDP). At the time of this
227 Federal Register (Vol. 68, No. 139).
228 Virginia B. Price, American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years, 83.
229 Christopher Stevens, “Paul Dolinsky – Four Decades of Preservation Through Documentation” (American Society
of Landscape Architects, 2019).

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writing (December 2024), the programs have completed nearly 45,900 total survey projects that
include over 328,800 black-and-white film photographs and over 6,150 color transparency film
photographs.230 The function of the nation’s first federal preservation program has not significantly
changed beyond its initial ambitious intent in 1933. It can now fulfill its vision of wide accessibility
to the American public to an even greater degree due to the internet. The HABS/HAER/HALS
collection currently exists as the most heavily used resource on the Prints and Photographs Online
Catalog (PPOC) website of the Library of Congress, with an average of eighty-five thousand unique
visitors each month (excluding NPS staff).231 Despite its small staff compared to the squads of the
1930s, HDP continues to produce comprehensive and impartial documentation, often prioritizing
sites at risk of demolition as the early Survey did.
DEVELOPMENT OF ACCESSIBILITY
When proposing the Historic American Buildings Survey, Charles Peterson recognized the
need to make architectural information available to the public as well as create a repository for
completed survey works as the collection expanded. Regarding the inclusion of the Survey within
this archival context, he states, “we knew what we had to do with [Survey material]. First of all, we
had to take them away from the guys that drew them, because they’re never through. There’s always
something they want to change in them, no matter how long they have them.”232 Since its inception,
the partnership between HABS and the Library of Congress has sought to ensure widespread public
access to the collection. This goal was “made clear by the printing in 1938, only five years after the
230 “HABS/HAER/HALS Collection Statistics” (National Park Service, 2024),
www.nps.gov/subjects/heritagedocumentation/collection-statistics.htm
231 Ryan Brubacher, “Celebrating 90 Years of the Historic American Buildings Survey” (2023).
232 Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History, 120.

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Historic American Buildings Survey was created, of the first published catalog to the HABS
collection at the Library of Congress.”233
Segmented into distinct divisions that oversee its nearly 180 million items, the Library’s
Prints and Photographs Division (P&P), under which the HABS/HAER/HALS collection is
housed today, was officially designated in 1897.234 Despite photography’s nearly sixty-year existence
at the time of its founding, the division initially focused solely on non-photographic prints. By 1929,
the Prints Division was reorganized as the Fine Arts Division to accommodate the growing range of
graphic material.235 It was under this department that the early HABS program received considerable
support from Leicester B. Holland, chief of the Fine Arts Division. The tripartite agreement that
formed the program mandates that HABS records “will become public property and will be
accessible to the public for research purposes, subject to the laws and regulations of the Library.”236
Upon its final reorganization in 1945, the P&P made HABS/HAER/HALS documentation
available for view within its reading room in Washington, D.C., and has stored physical copies of the
original records in a high-density facility at Fort Meade since 1994.237
Printed catalogs allowed Americans to view the survey documents from their homes or local
libraries across the country. However, the collection’s easy reach excluded Black Americans and
other marginalized groups, particularly in the American South, for whom library access was
segregated or limited. At the time of the Survey’s undertaking and distribution, fewer than half of
southern Black Americans had access to public libraries compared to White access.238 Emblematic of
233 Mary M. Ison, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 4.
234 “Fascinating Facts” (Library of Congress, 2022), www.loc.gov/about/fascinating-facts/.
235 C. Ford Peatross, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 241.
236 United States Department of the Interior, “HABS Circular No. l.”
237 “Library of Congress High Density Storage Facility” www.librarytechnology.org/storagefacility/8.
238 “In the late 1930s about 21.4 percent of southern African Americans had public library service, about half the White
level of 42.7 percent.” Michael Fultz, “Black Public Libraries in the South in the Era of De Jure Segregation” (2006),
342.

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a much larger problem in American society, the exclusion of many Americans’ access to what was
intended to be a comprehensive, undiscriminating survey of all notable American architecture for
the public’s unfettered use undermined the Survey’s attempts at successful distribution.
Amidst the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the desegregation of libraries was central to
movements toward social equality. White Southerners responded with actions ranging from petty
hindrances, such as removing all the chairs and tables, to more violent acts, like the 1963 brutal
beating of two Black ministers in Anniston, Alabama who were advocating for library desegregation.
In relation to broader civil rights efforts aimed at achieving holistic social equality, “the integration
of libraries generally proceeded more quickly than did the movement to desegregate other southern
public institutions, especially schools and their teachers, indicating a unique place for libraries within
the southern social imagination.”239 While the HABS catalog had little to do with these efforts
toward equal rights, the importance of libraries and their access for the American people emphasizes
the value in broadening the Survey’s public reach, particularly since much of the early work
documents Southern vernacular architecture. An updated catalog had been reprinted in 1941, with a
supplement printed in 1959 to amend the growing list of works included in the Survey.240 Yet as the
collection grew and society changed, this system became glaringly less effective. After 1959, the
comprehensive HABS catalog was replaced by those organized at the state level, a change that
proved incomprehensive and ineffectual. 241
As library technology evolved, resources such as microfilm expanded access to
HABS/HAER photographs. Research libraries did not begin using microform documents until the
mid-twentieth century, despite its invention soon after that of the daguerreotype in 1839. It was not
239 Michael Fultz, “Black Public Libraries in the South in the Era of De Jure Segregation,” 346.
240 Robert Bruegmann, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 220-221.
241 Robert Bruegmann, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 221.

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until 1974 that portions of the HABS/HAER collection were first made available on the medium.242
Around eight years later, “the firm of Chadwyck Healey, Ltd., published on microfiche all HABS
photographs and data pages transmitted to the Library of Congress through 1979. Approximately
eighty-five thousand images were thus made available to HABS users for purchase of prints that
same year.”243 As availability of the collection broadened in libraries and private catalogs throughout
the 1980s, so too did the potential of computer technology. The HABS/HAER office recognized
the need to technologically inventory the collection before of the production of a book to honor the
program’s fiftieth anniversary. Persistently low on funding, the publication of the first
comprehensive HABS/HAER print catalog since 1941 was achieved through the help of summer
student interns and donations.244
Computerization in the 1980s prompted the Library of Congress to begin building a
repository of digitized images in 1982.245 The Library of Congress’ National Digital Library Program
(NDLP) was launched as a pilot in 1990 to digitize works and make them accessible for searching
and viewing. As public use of the internet grew, in 1993 the NDLP began redirecting its efforts to
provide online availability. Initially stored on video disk and available for viewing in the P&P reading
room, the growing digitized collection was made widely available for public access in June 1994
through the Library’s American Memory online archive.246 This initial endeavor included only three
collections from the P&P. By December 1998, thirteen P&P collections had been made available in
the online archive, representing a total of over 220,000 items.247 One of the largest of the thirteen
242 Mary M. Ison, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 4.
243 Robert J. Kapsch, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 286.
244 Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, xii.
245 Caroline R. Arms, “Getting the Picture: Observations from the Library of Congress on Providing Online Access to
Pictorial Images” (1999), 382.
246 Caroline R. Arms, “Getting the Picture: Observations from the Library of Congress on Providing Online Access to
Pictorial Images,” 382.
247 Caroline R. Arms, “Getting the Picture: Observations from the Library of Congress on Providing Online Access to
Pictorial Images,” 383.

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digitized collections was the HABS/HAER collection, which was uploaded to the website in phases
under a collection titled Built in America. This was concurrently made accessible through the PPOC
interface, which offered more expansive access to photographs that were either out of scope of the
American Memory archive or restricted by copyright. The American Memory website has since been
retired, but the HABS/HAER/HALS collection is still available for online access on PPOC today,
with nearly 450,000 digitized items.
The American Memory program reflected the Library’s intentional consideration of user
access. Although the Library of Congress was established as a professional research library, “the
focus [of American Memory] is on retrieval by the nonspecialist from a body of materials related to
the history and culture of the United States.”248 The advent of the internet allowed libraries to
expand access in previously unfeasible ways, reaching those for whom visiting the P&P reading
room or locating a physical HABS catalog may not have been a consideration. Differing from
Peterson’s mark of a completed project as that which is encased within the secure finality of an
archive, John Burns cites the undiscriminating access afforded by digital surrogate images as the
project’s end goal in affirming, “A project is not completed until anyone in America can click on a
photo and download it for free.”249
The practices for collections management and archival technique within the Library of
Congress’s P&P will continue to operate fundamentally unchanged by the inclusion of born-digital
imagery within the HABS/HAER/HALS collection, as these practices are already well established
for other collections transmitted to P&P.250 The most notable difference for HDP will be a steady
248 Caroline R. Arms, “Getting the Picture: Observations from the Library of Congress on Providing Online Access to
Pictorial Images,” 379.
249 John Burns quoted in Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, Lost in America: Photographing the Last Days of Our
Architectural Treasures (CityFiles Press, 2023), 28.
250 In addition to other born-digital photographic collections (such as the Carol Highsmith collection), P&P has been
archiving digital files made by the architecture, design, and engineering (ADE) community, such as drawings created
through the use of Computer Aided Design (CAD), since the 1990s. More information on the Library’s 2017 summit

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increase of (color) images available on PPOC for public download as less restrictive equipment
allows more photographers to complete surveys for the collection. Collections management within
HDP will likely abide by the same standards of quality and cohesion as it currently does upon the
inclusion of born-digital images, adjusting only the practical means of analyzing photographic
submissions. The archival challenge in modernizing HDP photographic documentation is
predominantly a semantic and infrastructural matter, relating directly to the Standards and practices
that govern the collection.
INTERPRETATION OF HDP PHOTOGRAPHS
As historic preservation movements reached mainstream America, conveying the visual
characteristics of the historic built environment took on additional value within the public eye.
HABS photographer of the 1960s and ’70s Jack Boucher was particularly instrumental in “defining
the national standards of excellence for the entire field of architectural photography of historic
structures.… Jack’s photography is not only expected to technically capture the architectural image;
it is also expected to assist in the process of defining [the important visual values of architecture to
which the American historic preservation movement is, in part, dedicated].”251 HABS photographers
are careful not to add or remove any significant context from the scene, presenting the key visual
components of architecture exactly as they exist within their setting at the time of capture. This is an
ideology not unlike that of Ruskin’s theory of nonintervention, which underscores contemporary
preservation movements. In a similar vein to the documentary perspective of the New Topographics
deliberating current issues and procedures relating to ADE drawings can be found in Aliza Leventhal’s 2018 report
“Designing the Future Landscape: Digital Architecture, Design & Engineering Assets.”
251 Robert J. Kapsch, A Record in Detail: The Architectural Photographs of Jack E. Boucher (The University of Missouri Press,
1988), vii.

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show of 1975, the often deadpan framing prescribed by HABS documentary photography invites
personal interpretation by the viewer in its distinct lack of artificially concocted narrative.
Thoroughness and accuracy rely on a skillful employment of both compositional techniques
and a comprehensive understanding of the important features found within the building at hand. In
working with a particular site to capture shots of the highest quality, HDP photographer Jack
Boucher
has experienced American architecture in a way that many architectural historians
have not: he has examined with his own eyes every building he has recorded. He
has walked around and through them all; he has savored their details. He has seen
them under every condition of light and weather.252
This careful examination of the building allows for capture of significant details, such as the
characteristic doorknob of Kingston City Hall, which would likely not be documented in measured
drawings and therefore risks being overlooked by future researchers. (Figure 6.3) Architectural
historian Denys Peter Myers praises the inclusion of these unique visual elements in his scholarly use
of the HABS collection. He admits that “although I was not specifically seeking them, photographs
that illustrated such widely diverse subjects as Victorian domestic furniture and wheeled vehicles
turned out to be so beguiling that they compelled my notice.” 253 Myers cites decorative features,
hardware, early heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, electric fixtures, and
now-rare carpet and window shade designs as a few key elements of life in the past that photographs
can capture alongside more practical information about a building.
252 Jack E. Boucher, A Record in Detail: The Architectural Photographs of Jack E. Boucher, 1.
253 Denys Peter Myers, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 127.

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Figure 6. 3: Jack Boucher, “DOOR KNOB WITH CITY SEAL - Kingston City Hall, 408 Broadway, Kingston, Ulster
County, NY,” 1973, digital scan of film negative, Library of Congress, HABS NY,56-KING,16—14,
www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ny0825.photos.124083p/.

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A clear example of photography’s ability to capture changing social trends is seen in the 1971
recreation of an early, undated photograph of the spiral staircase at the Captain Charles L.
Shrewsbury House in Madison, Indiana. (Figure 6.4) (Figure 6.5) Rephotographing the same view by
positioning the camera where an earlier photographer had placed theirs is a uniquely useful way of
comparing changes to the built environment over time. As architectural documentation, the images
are primarily intended to record structural elements such as the central staircase and hallway. Yet the
evolution of interior design choices and electrical upgrades offers insight into a changing society that
is often not captured by measured drawings or written accounts.

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Figure 6. 4: H. M. Flora, “Spiral stairway. - Captain Charles L. Shrewsbury House, 301 West First Street (High & Poplar
Streets), Madison, Jefferson County, IN,” date unknown, digital scan of film negative, Library of Congress, HABS
IND,39-MAD,1—4, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/in0131.photos.064655p/.

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Figure 6. 5: Jack E. Boucher, “Detail of spiral stairway - Captain Charles L. Shrewsbury House, 301 West First Street
(High & Poplar Streets), Madison, Jefferson County, IN,” 1971, digital scan of color transparency film, Library of
Congress, HABS IND,39-MAD,1—18, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/in0131.color.572125c/.

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In HABS Circular No. 1, Vint advised that “long accounts of genealogical matter and
sentimental mythology have no place in this program. Factual matter only such as dates of buildings,
owners, and other pertinent data is desired.”
254 Yet contemporary practice allows for more in-depth,
longform written reports. Similarly, photographers have sought to document cultural context in
addition to architectural elements, even as early as the 1930s. In photographing La Rionda Cottage
in New Orleans, photographer Richard Koch chose to include two local children, clearly posed
before the building’s front facade. (Figure 6.6) The cottage is historically noteworthy both as an
example of architecture vernacular to southern Louisiana as well as home to a mixed-race
schoolhouse in the rear yard. Owned by Medard Nelson, a Black man who ran and taught at the
school in open defiance of emerging Jim Crow laws, the site remained an operating school building
at the time of Koch’s photograph. Although ethical questions emerge when considering the
implications of what is essentially ethnographic documentation of Black children by a White
photographer, this image nevertheless captures important context about the significance of the site
through its deliberately posed figures.
254 United States Department of the Interior, “HABS Circular No. l.”

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Figure 6. 6: Richard Koch, “FRONT ELEVATION DETAIL Seen from West – La Rionda Cottage, 1218-1220
Burgundy Street, New Orleans, Orleans Parish, LA,” 1938, digital scan of film negative, Library of Congress, HABS
LA,36-NEWOR,20—3, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/la0040.photos.072806p/.

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The inclusion of non-architectural elements in a scene can inadvertently insinuate their
significance or imply meaning beyond that of strict architectural documentation. In the case of
Koch’s La Rionda Cottage image, the children’s identities have not been included in the caption, so
whether they are truly students at the school remains unclear. In other instances, the identity of a
foreground figure is speculated in the photograph’s title or caption. Lowe’s documentation of
Pennsylvania’s Germania Brewery features what is labeled as “Quite possibly a retired bottler and his
dog, Spot,” an assumption that marks the photographer’s intervention in the perception of the
scene. (Figure 6.7) Like Koch’s cottage, the Germania Brewery building is still well represented, but
the deliberate inclusion of social elements provides an additional layer of meaning. When used to
display engineering processes, people can even act as the primary subject in a documentary
photograph, such as Boucher’s dramatic 1971 HAER image of a blacksmith at his forge. (Figure 6.8)
The intricate composition, which relies on positioning auxiliary flashbulbs to illuminate the subject
for a long enough exposure that the streaks of his iron work effectively burn into the film,
documents the industrial process of the forge while simultaneously acting as a persuasively artful
image.

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Figure 6. 7: Jet Lowe, “Quite Possibly a Retired Bottler and His Dog Spot in Foreground - Germania Brewery, Front &
Gordon Streets, Allentown, Lehigh County, PA,” 1979, digital scan of film negative, Library of Congress, HAER PA,39-
ALLEN,5—2, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/pa1866.photos.135241p/.

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Figure 6. 8: Jack Boucher, “Blacksmith Keyser At Forge, With Sparks. – Keyser Brothers Iron Works, 4041 Ridge
Avenue, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, PA,” 1971, digital scan of film negative, Library of Congress, HAER PA,51-
GERM,192—15, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/pa1057.photos.136608p/.

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Only in recent years has consideration been given to the technical methods and applications
of such creative documentation, since at the HABS program’s conception, “what did not happen
was a debate about the purpose or the technical means of recording historic buildings. This was
taken for granted because the measured drawing was already so familiar to almost every
architect.”255 Initially intended as a scientific catalog, the HABS collection has changed in use over
the years, which has changed how its photography is composed. By the mid- to late twentieth
century, the images created for the collection became most frequently used for book and magazine
publishing. The clearest difference between photographs from the early era and those of midcentury
and beyond is seen in the general absence of the measuring stick dictated by Bulletin #11. While
some documentation continued to use the foot ruler when deemed appropriate, photographers
generally prioritized visually compelling compositions. The result created “photographs without
intrusions but which contained less information for those interested in the details of the building
under study.” 256 While still regarded as documentation, photographs without the presence of a scale
emphasize a shift in visual priority and a changing role of photography within the Survey.
Although all photographs of a building in its natural context invariably contain creative
choices and unpredictable conditions, perhaps the best example of compellingly crafted architectural
documentation is seen in photographs of the Ulysses S. Grant Cottage. (Figure 6.9) Captured in the
middle of the building’s demolition, this photograph reflects the medium’s unique ability to
seemingly freeze time, in which “a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the
naked eye - if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously
explored by man.” Walter Benjamin explains that “even if one has a general knowledge of the way
people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride….
255 Robert Bruegmann, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 211.
256 Robert J. Kapsch, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 283.

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Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and
isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.”257 The unnatural
suspension of in-between moments provided by the camera supplies a glimpse of the world as it was
never intended to be viewed and which can never be reliably replicated in uniform quality. “Thierry
de Duve goes further and maintains that, in effect, instantaneous photography ‘captures’ a moment
that does not really exist (since ‘reality is not made out of singular events; it is made out of the
continuous happening of things’).”258 It can be easy to downplay the unnatural suspension of time
when considering photographic documentation of static objects like architecture, but even a
building’s seemingly immovable presence experiences constant change from its surroundings.
257 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 13.
258 Mary Ann Doanne, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, 209.

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Figure 6. 9: Jack Boucher, “During Demolition, Showing House Splitting in Half - Ulysses S. Grant Cottage, 995 Ocean
Avenue, Long Branch, Monmouth County, NJ,” 1963, digital scan of film negative, Library of Congress, HABS NJ,13-
LOBRA, 2-19, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/nj0884.photos.108281p/.
With the bulldozer featured in the forefront and the house split in half, the photograph of
the Ulysses S. Grant Cottage captures a moment that could never be so thoroughly examined in real
life. (Figure 6.9) In immobilizing the action of the scene, “this ambiguous status creates a complex
temporality. Since the photograph is in the past tense the viewer will always come to it ‘too late’; the
action will have already taken place. On the other hand, since the instantaneous photograph arrests
an action before its completion, the viewer will always be ‘there’ too soon.”259 Presented with the
259 Mary Ann Doanne, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, 209.

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lack of complete sensory context, a viewer of the digital image or film negative is not subject to the
cacophony of splitting wood or the suffocating cloud of billowing dust stirred up by falling debris.
Placed in an archival repository, the image therefore documents the fact that the event occurred but
fails to capture in complete accuracy the reality of the scene. It can be viewed at a distance, as an
artificially severed moment in time, without the adrenaline and emotion that likely clouded the
perception of its photographer and others viewing the demolition in real life. In documentation such
as this, each falling shingle hovering beside the roof owes its visual preservation to the distinct
moment the photographer chose to press the shutter.
Documentation produced for HDP can be useful in building reconstructions, existing
conditions assessments, and recordation. Yet what has maintained the collection’s relevance is its
ability to frame sites’ cultural importance in a way that persuades, assists, and benefits the public.
While not intended as a preventative or advocacy measure against demolition, the resources
produced by HABS/HAER/HALS projects are valuable in their ability to put the viewer “into the
frame of mind to try to do something for the preservation of [historic] buildings.”260 Regardless of
the inherent impermanence and subjectivity of documentary photography, the study and practice of
architecture, history, and historic preservation nevertheless depend on these visual representations.
In its rigid adherence to the closest possible depiction of accuracy and truth, HDP offers a uniquely
reliable resource amidst the overwhelming flood of images available in our contemporary world.
260 AAA CBH, Charles Porter interview, 53 as cited in John H. Sprinkle Jr., Crafting Preservation Criteria: The National
Register of Historic Places and American Historic Preservation, 30.

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Conclusion
“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The
thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve
agreed to be part of a collective perception.” – Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
INTERPRETATION OF PLACES AND THE PAST
Akin to the sense of permanence and artificial memory seemingly offered by the assumed
stability of the photograph, proponents of historic preservation can be misguided by “one of
[preservation’s] psychological attractions [as a] symbol of permanence in an everchanging world,
perhaps because historic structures - those tangible and often massive artifacts - take on a semblance
of permanence and ultimate truth not found in other intellectual endeavors, or even in our daily
lives.” 261 This illusory allure of permanence and truth indicates the primitive desire for palpable
security that photography, archives, and historic buildings appear to offer in their ability to
seemingly freeze time and guide our perception of what is worth looking at. However, historian
David Lowenthal points out that “just as the stable climax beloved of nature conservers gave way to
fragile and temporary equilibria punctuated by episodic perturbations, so are cultural stewards now
conscious that no human creation endures forever, that the decay of site and city, artifact and work
of art can only be retarded, never prevented.”262 Accepting the inherent ephemerality of memory, the
built environment, and even the notion of visual authenticity can free contemporary practitioners
from the constraints imposed by attempting to ensure unattainable traits, focusing instead on
stewarding both sites and their interpretations as best we can for as long as we can.
The wake of emerging technologies necessitates a reconsideration of established frameworks
for visual depiction, particularly in regard to photographic documentation. Preserving digital images
261 William C. Baer, “Should Art or Science be Preservation’s Guiding Metaphor? An Examination of Historic
Preservation’s Underlying Philosophy” (National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1991), 37.
262 David Lowenthal, “Stewarding the Past in a Perplexing Present” (2000), 20.

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in a similar manner to their analog counterparts depends on a continual strategy of file migration,
creative solutions, and human intervention that ultimately relies on the understanding that these files
may not last forever. Trevor Owens refers to this recognition as the “archival sliver,” admitting that
“we’ve never saved everything. We’ve never saved most things.” He emphasizes the benefits of this
mentality in dedicating efforts to more productive pursuits, since “when we start from the
understanding that most things are temporary and likely to be lost to history, [we can] shift our
focus and energy to making sure we line up the resources necessary to protect the things that matter
the most.”263 In architectural photography’s distinct ability to reframe a viewer’s perception of the
world around them, preserving effective instances of such framing is vital in encouraging continued
appreciation and study of the visual world.
Encouraged by the potential to reliably catalog the existing world, documentary
photographic surveys such as HABS reflect the importance of graphic representation for thoughtful
interpretation of historic buildings. Initially created to chronicle a survey of American architecture
“by architects, for architects,” HDP today is a valuable research tool for the American public, used
by a wide range of people from young students to established professionals.264 Such photographic
architectural documentation also proves useful for advertising, merchandising, or creative endeavors,
particularly since HDP photographs exist within the public domain. The program’s initial urgency to
catalog our rapidly changing built environment for the sake of visual posterity “remains as real today
as it was when the program was created. If anything, our architectural, industrial and landscape
heritage is being lost at an even faster pace.” 265 While HDP photography assigns specific
requirements for equipment and quality, the prevalence and ease of architectural photography within
263 Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 8.
264 Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History, 118.
265 Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, Lost in America: Photographing the Last Days of Our Architectural Treasures, 9.

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contemporary culture promises to supply a growing repository of depictions of our rapidly changing
world, regardless of such images’ questionable archival stability or commitment to authenticity.
Conceived at a time when photography was believed to capture a reliable mirror of the
world, HABS photography has thus far sought to reflect those ideals. Despite the benefits of visual
media in its ability to render the world around us, conflating such depictions with authenticity has
historically “been entangled with an ocularcentric world view that understands sight as a source of
truth, reason, and human agency - a combination that has tended to solidify the position of the
privileged.” 266 The many variables present within photographic depictions as a result of differences
in camera, lens, processing mechanics, and output media reveal that capturing a truthful visual
depiction does not always reflect exactly what we believe our eyes perceive about the visual world.
By recognizing that sight is not always indicative of truth, the feasibility of objective documentation
becomes increasingly complicated. Considered in tandem with the degree of human agency that we
now understand to be present within mechanical operations like photography, objectivity must
assume new meaning in our contemporary world.
In today’s digital age, the ease of visual alterations afforded by post-processing software
offers an abundance of choices for the photographer beyond those already present in film
photography. As concerns over digital manipulation intensify with the introduction of new
technologies, visual culture scholar Katharina Fackler cautions that these fears “may be grounded in
a nostalgia for a bygone era of clear and simple relations between photography, human observers,
and ‘the real world’ that never existed.”267 The underlying documentary mission and adherence to
regulatory processes that demarcate HDP photography attempt to uphold the – albeit faulty –
266 Katharina Fackler, “Of Stereoscopes and Instagram: Materiality, Affect, and the Senses from Analog to Digital
Photography,” 520.
267 Katharina Fackler, “Of Stereoscopes and Instagram: Materiality, Affect, and the Senses from Analog to Digital
Photography,” 520.

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relation between the viewer and the “real world” to a degree that other contemporary photographic
practices, such as commercial photography or images produced by artificial intelligence, have
deliberately disregarded. Though grounded in nostalgia for a fictionally truthful world, this
commitment to the best possible documentation establishes the reliability of the program in a way
that transcends medium, equally feasible with either film or digital photography.
The use of architectural documentation in many of its current applications would have
perplexed and astounded the founders of HABS. Through the development of unmanned aircraft
systems (UAS) drone imaging, photogrammetry, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scanning, and
other technologies, the concept of visual documentation has evolved significantly since the use of
daguerreotypes to render the largely unrecorded built world. Although undeniably helpful in their
own rights, the abundance of different recording technologies, particularly those that relay
information three-dimensionally, can appear to threaten the usefulness of the traditional
photographic image. Photographer Iñaki Bergera argues that today, “we live in a world saturated
with architectural images that we consume voraciously, without any possibility of digesting them, or
even less of savouring them. This fact has produced a sort of visual agnosia that seems to
incapacitate the comprehensive and critical analysis of what we see … far from making our
understanding clearer, this saturation makes it even more opaque.”268 Nevertheless, photography’s
continued inclusion within the HDP is a testament to its persuasive and compelling influence. The
collection’s concise and deliberately composed images showcasing sites’ significant features offer a
relief from the overwhelming abundance of pictorial data constantly available at one’s fingertips.
Although less analytically precise than measured drawings or a three-dimensional model,
photographic images remain among the most frequently retrieved elements of PPOC. As both
268 Iñaki Bergera, “Photography and Architecture: From Technical Vision to Art and Phenomenological (Re)Vision”
(Routledge, 2016), 117.

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documentation and works of art, their underlying ideology compels the viewer to savor their
architectural details in ways that other, less carefully crafted images may not.
FUTURE OF HDP PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION
Although film photography cycles through revivals in popularity among some photographic
circles, its contemporary use and availability are unlikely to ever overtake those of digital imaging. As
a result, film equipment is difficult to buy or get repaired, developing chemicals and processing labs
are in limited supply, and photographers trained on large-format cameras are less prevalent than the
number of buildings in need of documentation. Since architectural documentation requires “the
combined skills of the artist, the technician, and the preservationist,” as well as “an understanding of
the need for the documentation and the potential uses it may have in the future,” the pool of
qualified and interested large-format photographers becomes even smaller.269 The exclusivity and
expense of such high-quality film photography poses a barrier for newcomers to the field,
threatening the long-term vitality of HDP and its production of content.
As a persuasive tool within the field of preservation, the dangers of ascribing a singular
interpretation of cultural spaces by restricting photographers to an exclusive pool of trained
professionals threatens to alienate the diverse array of users of the collection. Architectural historian
Charles L. Davis notes that, in viewing architecture, sites are often depicted “through the lens of the
embodied racial codes we inherit.” Davis further ascribes the “architect’s unfettered access to his or
her surroundings as a latent symptom of the racial privileges of whiteness that remain embodied in
ritualized notions of space.”270 Akin to the unfettered access of the architect, architectural
photographers assume possession over space through their documentation process. Although
269 Michael F. Lynch, “Photographic Documentation” (1987), 54.
270 Charles L. Davis, “Blackness in Practice: Toward an Architectural Phenomenology Of Blackness” (2018), 49.

143
HABS initially sought to aid the American public in an understanding of architectural styles through
the employment of out-of-work architects, the program “soon became a tool for an elite group of
professional men, trained in architecture and history, to gather the architectural documentation that
was necessary in constructing their ultimate goal: a holistic narrative of American architecture.”271
This deliberately crafted narrative dictates a specific, privileged perspective on American history.
Despite intentions for widespread participation, HDP’s restrictive standards and existence as a
fixture in the federal government continue to prohibit truly inclusive participation by photographers
from all demographics and social classes. Embracing the photographic vision of a more diverse array
of photographers rejects the assumed ubiquity of experience and encourages unique perspectives on
the historic sites represented in the collection.
Since the 1960s, HABS has made deliberate attempts to train future generations about
architecture through guided documentation projects. In the spirit of such training, “for HABS,
thorough field work and research are an important part of the process, aimed at providing not just a
permanent record, but an approach to the study and understanding of historic buildings.”272 The
Survey’s encouragement of non-professional work and student training has continued through the
present day, although no similar program has ever been instituted to support the non-professional
production of photographs. Instead, the abundance of squad photographers of the Survey’s early
days were replaced by only a handful (often only one or two at a time) of professional
photographers employed directly by the NPS. Not intending to exclude external creators, HDP
nevertheless recognizes that updates to photographic Standards must be “accessible not only inhouse, but to professional photographers and students as well [since] HDP has always viewed
educating the next generation of preservation and architectural professionals as one of its top
271 Paul Hardin Kapp, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South, 213.
272 Catherine C Lavoie, American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years, 87.

144
priorities.”273 Encouraging the next generation of architectural photographers by updating the
program’s photographic Standards for the digital age promises to uphold the program’s
commitment to encouraging continued careful appreciation and study of historic buildings into the
future.
Although concision is necessary to the collection’s archival qualities, increasing those
involved in creating HDP documentation through guidance that encourages new photographers
promises to both expand participation within the field as well as strengthen the quality of the
collection. Intrinsically tied to the study and development of architecture and historic preservation,
an increase in architectural documentary photographers for the program affects the success of all
aspects of the field. John Burns notes that “better records and improved recordkeeping as well as
increased public awareness of the importance of architectural records will make research easier.”274
Catalyzing interest in documentation of historic buildings among a new generation of photographers
promises to enhance appreciation for such structures on a broad scale. Faced with the everincreasing demolition and neglect of historic structures across the country, the potential for a greater
number of equipped photographers offers an unprecedented opportunity for improved proliferation
of the program.
Today, a substantial amount of documentation is produced for mitigation measures at state
or local levels, which do not require compliance with stringent HDP guidelines - which then
precludes this documentation from entering the collection. The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards
and Guidelines encourage that “in establishing [state or local] archives, the important questions of
durability and reproducibility should be considered in relation to the purposes of the collection.”275
273 Anne Mason and Stephen D. Schafer, “Focus on the Future: Creating Born-Digital Standards for Large-Format
Photography,” 2.
274 John A. Burns, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 238.
275 Federal Register (Vol. 48, No. 190).

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Many of these archives maintain a commitment to durability and reproducibility while embracing
digital imaging as a less expensive and less exclusionary alternative to large-format photography. The
omission of such documentation projects from the HABS/HAER/HALS collection due to the
program’s adherence to analog capture undermines the spirit of creating a comprehensive and
accessible account of the nation’s architectural heritage that formed the basis of the initial Survey.
Despite a common misconception, the question of how to permanently store born-digital
records is not the main problem for HDP; the problem is that the unrealistic and unfounded
archival requirements prescribed by the Standards and Guidelines put the program in a category of
its own. Even upon digitizing the entirety of the P&P collection in 1998, “for the HABS/HAER
materials, the challenge was less the shortage of information to support access but more its
incompatibility with library practice and formats.”276 Despite the program’s uniqueness, trust in the
Library of Congress as established in the 1934 tripartite agreement continues to prevail over the
partnership with HDP today. HDP photographer Jarob Ortiz affirmed on a podcast in 2021 that
“the Library of Congress has given us the assurance that [born-digital preservation] can be done.
And they are the leaders in that arena…. I’ve always said to everyone that ever asks me this question
about the digitals … it’s not my job to question them.”277
Amending the Standards and Guidelines to allow for digital photography is not as simple as
it may appear, however. The indefinite level of detail that is recorded within a sheet of film is nearly
impossible to translate into a numeric quantity of digital image resolution, since the qualities of the
smooth gradation of film’s tonal range do not logically apply to the uniform and discrete grid of
pixels in a digital image. Additionally, improvements to camera technologies continually increase the
276 Caroline R. Arms, “Getting the Picture: Observations from the Library of Congress on Providing Online Access to
Pictorial Images,” 391.
277 Andrew Bartram, Simon Forster, and Erik Mathy (hosts), “#46 Jarob Ortiz; Ansel Adams Did Not Do My Job!”
(2021), 42:52:00.

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potential resolution of images. Establishing a minimum megapixel standard of required image quality
is therefore not a simple solution of adapting the Standards to digital imagery, and as a result “HDP
is having difficulty expressing the amount of information that is captured in a 5" x 7" film negative
in a way that is understandable by students and professional photographers.”278 Cameras with
sensors that allow for a high-resolution image, like the 150MP PhaseOne IQ4, are helpful in
capturing a large amount of minute detail within a scene but are not always necessary for the
production of a useful image. A digital camera with half or even one-third of the PhaseOne’s
resolution may yield a perfectly acceptable result for the purposes of the collection, and be less
exclusive than the PhaseOne’s high cost and hefty file sizes.
Grappling with how best to relay guidelines that remain congruent with the established
quality of the HABS/HAER/HALS collection when presented with the many adjustments available
for a digital image, the program faces the difficulty of conveying “concepts such as the importance
of the quality of optics of a lens … the importance of signal to noise ratios (and at what point too
much noise means the image is not acceptable) … [and] how to measure the data captured by
imaging systems[, since] tests have consistently shown that even though a camera manufacturer may
claim that their camera creates 80 megapixel file-sizes, the actual optical resolution may not be nearly
that high.”279 While, in theory, the logical computing framework of electronic data implies an ease of
establishing clear guidelines that is unattainable for the smooth, continuous representation that
characterizes film, digital images nevertheless exhibit the same messiness and interpretability of
physical media. The Digital Asset Management (DAM) system currently used by an accession
archivist who “can ‘eyeball’ a drawing, field note, or photographic negative to establish its integrity
278 Anne Mason and Stephen D. Schafer, “Focus on the Future: Creating Born-Digital Standards for Large-Format
Photography,” 2.
279 Anne Mason and Stephen D. Schafer, “Focus on the Future: Creating Born-Digital Standards for Large-Format
Photography,” 2.

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…is not so easy with digital files. Each file must be individually checked for errors and for the
required metadata, adding information where it is absent.”280 Recognizing that there is no definitively
correct way to adapt practices to include digital files, and that technology will inevitably change as
time progresses, the evaluation of images for inclusion in the HABS/HAER/HALS collection must
ultimately rely on informed but variable personal judgment, and standards that serve to guide but
not limit the photographers’ intended expression.
As with any relatively small department within the federal government, problems such as
funding, staffing, and regulatory measures have significant influence over the extent of changes that
HDP can practically implement. Adapting procedure to digital technologies may require “digital
forensic tools [with] more computing power than the average computer can provide. The National
Park Service does not have the IT infrastructure in place to allow for complex, memory intensive
digital forensic programs,” nor are these federal servers permitted or equipped to accept large,
unvetted data packages transmitted from unknown public entities.281 This both limits the extent of
high-quality digital images the program could accept since files may be too large, and may restrict the
tools available to catalog and analyze such submissions for signs of manipulation or duplication,
since that technical infrastructure is outside the scope of the program.
Photographs are currently processed manually by HDP collections staff, and the inclusion of
digital images would similarly rely on human-powered data analysis and retrieval. Ensuring
continuity among the analog and digital derivatives of the collection depends on deliberate decisions
by HDP staff - in terms of both content type and markers of photographic reliability. While postprocessing edits are perceptible in a file’s metadata, “the creation of extensive metadata and the
280 Catherine C. Lavoie, “HABS Documentation in the Digital Age: Combining Traditional and New 3D Methods of
Recording” (2011), 190.
281 Anne Mason and Stephen D. Schafer, “Focus on the Future: Creating Born-Digital Standards for Large-Format
Photography,” 3.

148
curation of files and formats is time-consuming and unrewarded, and …metadata standards are hard
to understand and harder to apply to an existing dataset.”282 Although the Library of Congress
already has DAM frameworks in place, HDP does not follow a DAM ingestion system, so must still
be able to process records in-house to adequately prepare the data for transfer to the LOC database.
Considering the abundance of logistical complications and restraints, it becomes clear that
ensuring legible photographic documentation of a site is merely the first step in adequately
preserving its legacy. Particularly when faced with the ever-evolving state of digital advancements,
“preservation is enabled through the design and function of [institutions like libraries, archives,
museums, families, religious organizations, governments, etc.]. Their org charts, hiring practices,
funding, credibility, etc. are all key parts of the cultural machinery that makes preservation
possible.”283 Updates to photographic procedures ultimately rely on effective internal scaffolding
within HDP’s staffing and institutional framework.
Through its inherent accessibility to the public and status as a continuously growing
collection, HDP documentation tries to remain ever cognizant of its usefulness and future
applicability in the current and future hands of the American people. Reflecting on the early days of
HABS, Charles Peterson credited the endeavor to a “burst of idealism and energy.” He holds a less
optimistic outlook on the political conditions of later years, noting that “under the conditions that
prevail today [in 1983], it probably could not have been started.”284 Without similar idealism
regarding adapting the program to our contemporary digital environment, the political conditions
that prevail today may likewise limit the creation and accessibility of HDP photography. Jarob Ortiz,
staff photographer for HDP since 2016, warns that “If we sit here and argue about the archivability
282 Adam Rabinowitz, Maria Esteva, and Jessica Trelogan, “Ensuring a Future for the Past” (2013), 4.
283 Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, 4-5.
284 Charles Peterson, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 7.

149
of [digital images over large-format film] we just might end up with the ability not to do any
documentation at all. We just need to go ahead and start setting these standards and guidelines [for
digital documentation] before it’s too late.”285 Regarding the archive not as an emblem of the past
but a resource for the future, the structure and production of its materials must similarly reflect the
evolving age in which they are produced.
Born of a period of dramatic architectural and social change, HABS reflects not a stubborn
adherence to the past but a forward-thinking vision of stewarding our historic legacy into the future.
An ambitious pursuit at the time it was proposed, HABS is rooted in its amenability to a changing
world. The seemingly obstructive legislative nature of the Standards and Guidelines appears to pose
a roadblock in the future of the program. However, the Standards and Guidelines for Architectural
and Engineering Documentation “are not regulatory and do not set or interpret agency policy. They
are intended to provide technical advice on how to produce architectural and engineering
documentation.”286 The role of the Standards and Guidelines is to advise rather than hinder. If the
advice provided is out of date or needlessly restrictive, it is not effective in its role as advice. The
future of architectural documentation - and its ability to shape our perception of the world around
us - lies in the embrace of consistently evolving innovative solutions. Such development is a staple
of the program, evidenced by the 1983 sentiment of John Burns: “Evolutionary change in HABS
methodology will continue to occur. Suggestions for assessment and adjustment from within the
program, from users of the collection, and from others are a welcome part of that process.”287
285 Andrew Bartram, Simon Forster, and Erik Mathy (hosts), “#46 Jarob Ortiz; Ansel Adams Did Not Do My Job!”
286 Federal Register (Vol. 68, No. 139), 43159.
287 John Burns, Historic America: Buildings, Structures, and Sites, 239.

150
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Appendices
1) SPECIFICATIONS FOR THE MEASUREMENT AND RECORDING OF HISTORIC
AMERICAN BUILDINGS AND STRUCTURAL REMAINS
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Since its introduction to the public in 1839, photography has radically changed cultural perceptions of vision, time, history, objectivity, and the ways these concepts relate to the built environment. Today photography is so prolific and accessible that it is difficult to escape the influence of such imagery on our ability to interpret the world around us. The development and evolution of digital media in recent decades have brought questions of visual reliability to the forefront of debate over photographic capture and use. Digital imagery’s ease of manipulation, potential for artificial generation, and questionable archival longevity appear to distinguish pixel-based images from their analog film predecessors when considering their use as documentary records.

For architectural appreciation, study, and recordation, the value of photographic documentation depends on its authenticity and public accessibility. The nature of digital media’s questionable level of human interference and unstable archival preservation appear to threaten the success of architectural documentation photography in the contemporary era. However, upon careful examination of historically evolving notions of objectivity and permanency, the ability of digital media to similarly adhere to qualities of analog documentation becomes evident. Regardless of format, maintaining a commitment to the best attempt at reliability and accessibility can help ensure that architectural photographic documentation can successfully convey the intended cultural significance of a given site for future generations.

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Creator Malnati, Samantha Angela (author)

Core Title Contemporary vision: photography's influence on perception of places and the past

School School of Architecture

Degree Master of Heritage Conservation / Master of Urban Planning

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Degree Conferral Date 2025-05

Publication Date 01/27/2025

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