practices. The first photographs often showed buildings – whose depictions inspired as much amazement as euphoria. The claim made by the literary figure Jules Janin, who visited the studio of Jean Louis Mandé Daguerres in 1839, is meanwhile legendary. Janin was so impressed by the daguerreotype that distinguishing between a real object and its depiction struck him as simply obsolete. He celebrated the photograph of Notre Dame as being a complete substitute for the building, since it quasi materially-inscribes itself in the photosensitive surface of the copper plate, and the photograph, as a simulacrum, takes the place of the object. [12]

Form and Surface – or: What is the Image of Architecture?

Through the styling of ornamental structures as well as serial arrangement principles, present-day artistic, architectural and landscape photography analyzes our perception and notion of urban space, nature, and landscapes.

As already discussed in the section «Realism as Staging,» Andreas Gursky accentuates spatial concepts

and surfaces in order to intensify the documentary-photograph impression. The clarity and depth of field of these images – whether an analog or digital exposure – allow viewers to make associations by way of a skillfully conceived and perfectly executed photography. In his first digitally-processed photograph, «Charles de Gaulle,» Gursky strengthens and intensifies the visual impression of the urban structure by multiplying many times over the complexity of a spatial situation with tube-like connecting routes: the image shows more tubes than there are in reality. Although this creates the impression of a ‹real› architecture – at the same time the image’s confusing, ornamental structure offers the gaze no support and heightens the supposed pictorialness. The Berlin-based artist Heidi Specker confronts the relation of building structure and materiality, for which she takes up the visual language of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Specker analyzes examples of modern architecture, primarily those of the ‹international style› of the 1960s and 1970s. She post-processes these images digitally, as she does, for example, in the series