Photography serves in different ways as tool for documenting the built environment and eventually to interrogate how space is shaped, inhabited, remembered, and ultimately reimagined. Some photographers when turn their gaze toward cities, they do more than capture façades or skylines—they reveal the social, political, and historical forces embedded within architecture. The four projects considered here—Keo Keo Ro by Taejay Lee, Lo spazio che resta by Luca Girardini, Temporal Reverberations by María José Vasconcelos, and Nonscape by Alex Currie—show photographic practices that expand the role of the medium from passive observation to critical investigation and even speculative design.
© Taejay Lee from "Keo Keo Ro"
In Keo Keo Ro, Taejay Lee approaches London not merely as a physical territory but as a palimpsest of ideologies and histories. Through processes of layering, décollage, and reconstruction, Lee translates the city’s cycles of demolition and redevelopment into a visual language of fragmentation and repair. The materiality of his process—blueprints, transparency film, grid paper—evokes the shared foundations of photography and architecture, positioning his work at the intersection of image-making and spatial planning.
© Taejay Lee from "Keo Keo Ro"
© Taejay Lee from "Keo Keo Ro"
By juxtaposing personal photographs with archival materials and commercial imagery, Lee questions who has the authority to design, occupy, and profit from urban space. His images become tools for unearthing hidden narratives and for examining how the forces of capitalism and memory shape the contemporary city.
Luca Girardini’s Lo spazio che resta shifts attention from grand narratives of redevelopment to the intimate and often invisible spaces through which a community negotiates its existence. In Venice—a city hyper-saturated by tourism—local inhabitants are increasingly pushed toward margins: residual courtyards, patronages, school yards, and sports grounds hidden within the dense urban fabric.
© Luca Girardini from "Lo spazio che resta"
© Luca Girardini from "Lo spazio che resta"
© Luca Girardini from "Lo spazio che resta"
By photographing these irregular, leftover spaces, Girardini reveals their symbolic and social importance. They are places of gathering, belonging, and resilience, carved out against the overwhelming forces that redefine the city for outsiders. His work demonstrates how photography can reveal the ways communities inhabit space, how they claim it, and how the built environment mediates identity. The camera thus becomes a instrument for uncovering what is otherwise unseen: the fragile equilibrium between a city’s monumental image and the lived reality of its inhabitants.
© Luca Girardini from "Lo spazio che resta"
Questions of identity and memory also underpin María José Vasconcelos’s Temporal Reverberations, which addresses the architecture of Cité Universitaire in Paris. Through multilayered photomontages she creates composite images that oscillate between documentation and illusion. The resulting forms suggest that architectural identity is neither stable nor singular, but constantly reconfigured by time, perspective, and cultural meaning.
© María José Vasconcelos from "Temporal Reverberations"
As the campus’s original mission of fostering peace through international exchange is confronted with contemporary concerns about identity and globalization, Vasconcelos uses photography to probe the evolving relationship between space and collective memory. Her images do not simply represent buildings; they question what these structures have come to symbolize and how their meaning continues to shift. Photography as an analytical device capable of visualizing the instability of memory and the fluidity of cultural identity embedded in architectural forms.
© María José Vasconcelos from "Temporal Reverberations"
© María José Vasconcelos from "Temporal Reverberations"
© María José Vasconcelos from "Temporal Reverberations"
Alex Currie’s Nonscape offers a markedly different perspective—one grounded in neutrality, distance, and structural clarity. Using a large-format camera, flat lighting, and long exposures, Currie constructs images of Croydon, England, that strip away the immediacy of movement and human presence.
© Alex Curries from "Nonscape"
What remains is a world of corporate façades, modernist remnants, and homogenized urban forms: a visual manifestation of Rem Koolhaas’s “Generic City” and Marc Augé’s “Non-Place.” By approaching the city without prior personal associations, Currie emphasizes the estrangement and uniformity that permeate many contemporary urban environments. Yet the objectivity of his images is not merely descriptive; it prompts reflection on how these spaces forge human experience and alienation. In doing so, photography enable viewers to scrutinize the spatial conditions of modern life and to question what has been lost in the pursuit of global sameness.
© Alex Curries from "Nonscape"
© Alex Curries from "Nonscape"
Taken together, these four projects engage the multifaceted role of photography in the study of the built environment. It can act as a witness, revealing the material and social structures that define how spaces are lived. It can function as critique, exposing inequalities, contradictions, and erasures within urban development. It can serve as a medium for memory, connecting past intentions with present realities and future possibilities. And, crucially, it can become a form of spatial speculation—using montage, layering, and abstraction to imagine new ways of representing and understanding architecture.
© Alex Curries from "Nonscape"
Photography, in this expanded sense, is not just about seeing the city but questioning its stories, amplifying overlooked experiences, and proposing new modes of perception. By intertwining observation, memory, and imagination, contemporary photographers transform the act of looking into a tool for rethinking the spaces we build and the ways we inhabit them.
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