Architects and designers are visual people. It’s no surprise that glossy magazines first, and image based architectural webzines after have captured their imaginations. The difference between the two modes of receiving images has to do with speed and quantity, a daily dose in the webzine rather than a weekly or monthly one in the magazine. Both are heavily reliant on the photographer’s eye, even more so if there is no critical account in words accompanying the images, which is often the case in architectural and design webzines. The photographer, paid for the images, will attempt to show the project in the best or most dramatic light. The less successful shots will stay in the digital memory of their hard disks or memory cards. However, it is some of these shots that may actually embody the possible criticism of the work, in a visual rather than word based way.

The main aspects that are often missing from the purely image based account of architecture are the understanding of the project’s physical, cultural and political context and the understanding of whether the project actually works in terms of its suitability to the brief. All can be summarized in the general word context, including the wider context of place, and the more specific context of client and users. It is exactly this aspect of context that can also be addressed by the photographer, to give a more rounded description of the project in question. Therefore the architectural photographer first, and their vehicles for publication second, have some kind of responsibility for a critical approach to their medium.

It is not that image based webzines are inherently uncritical per se, and it might not be their ultimate responsibility to be so. It is not necessarily correct that images are dumb ‘a priori’. The critical image can also replace the critical article, but it requires a thinking photographer to achieve this. I am calling for a shared responsibility on all architectural photographers to not only show the more photogenic side of the projects they are commissioned to photograph, but also to exercise a decision making process that can turn into images any contextual aspect that may come to light during their visit to the work. They are the eyes of our visually hungry collective, and have the option to look where many have not looked before. And this might just prove that the problem is not in the visual itself, but it is in who creates, or translates the project into an image.

Ultimately the photographer has actually ‘been’ to the project. They are the ones who have travelled to it, experiencing the places, the culture, the politics of the neighbouring cities, towns, villages or lack of them. They are the ones who may have met the client, and listened to their response to the finish work. They will have met the architect and would have heard their narrative, or lack of it. They may have talked to local people about the project. They might have spent days there. It may be that they are one of the first people to get a well rounded idea of the work they are meant to show in its best light.

Is it the responsibility of the webzine to filter out overly successful images of striking projects? That would be absurd. Clearly the webzine has to continue delivering striking images. But this does not mean that great images can’t be critical, quite the opposite. Some single images have succeeded in creating the critical imprint in a generation’s visual consciousness. I am thinking about the image that did this for Vietnam War, or for the Ethiopian famine. In many ways, the most striking images are always critical, or at least propositional; they lead to some emotional response.

In a time where the beautiful image is turned into a commercial commodity to attract advertisement revenues to one’s blog or webzine, it is actually only the sublime or the ugly that can still hold a critical dimension. This does not mean that architects and designers need to create ugly buildings and objects, nor that photographers need to take bad images. This means that in the webzine a balance needs to be achieved between the beautiful, uncritical image, and the less beautiful, but perhaps more dramatic critical one.

Will the contemporary architectural photographer, burdened by this new responsibility which is a direct result of the lack of language based criticism accompanying their work in the webzine, be able to balance the beautiful shot in the best light with a series of shots that have an implicit critical understanding of context in all its different meanings? If this can be achieved, then the image can become critical, maybe even more so than the written word. If this can be achieved, and appreciated by the architectural and design community, then we will begin to see that the problem was never simply in the glossy magazine or in the article-less webzine, the problem was always to do with who commissions the photos, and in what they never dared to ask the photographer.