“Building Pictures”

Josef Schulz, Halle Blau #1, 2001.

Architectural photographers tend to portray buildings as sterile monuments untouched by clutter, decay or—ideally—people. But the eight artists in “Building Pictures” offer a fresh take on the genre, Photoshopping buildings to transform them into pointed political commentaries and highlighting quiet details instead of glorifying exteriors.

Luisa Lambri focuses on the work of Luis Barragán, but she foregrounds her own meditations on the Mexican architect’s famous house by emphasizing the subtle light that seeps into its cracks. Dionisio González’s large-scale Santo Amaro III is a disjointed mélange of São Paulo’s favela shanties and the sleek facades of the city’s fancy, contemporary buildings: The photomontage is a metaphor for the poor fit of local government-gentrification schemes. Alexander Apóstol digitally removes the doors, the windows and any other openings from the 1950s Rationalist buildings he photographs in Venezuela, making visible the hermetic seal between their sheltered, wealthy inhabitants and the world outside. Challenging our notions of reality with photography’s “truthfulness” is not a new technique, but it’s unusually effective when applied to architecture. The buildings in Josef Schulz’s photos, which look like video-game scenery, remind viewers how much of our lives we conduct outside the physical world.

The artists of “Building Pictures” undermine our expectations of architecture by manipulating it at will, but in doing so, they transform buildings into art—and restore their potential for wonder.