Luisa Lambri

From Art History to Photographing the Experience of Architecture

Lambri studied art history at the universities of Milan and Bologna. Her interest lies less in designing architecture than in the sensations and memories that existing spaces produce in those who enter them. She has said that she does not select buildings according to the architect’s fame, but chooses spaces with which she feels a relation and in which she can project aspects of herself.^*1 In the late 1990s, architectural photography commonly presented the form and function of finished buildings with clarity, while contemporary art increasingly addressed the body’s experience of place and the politics of representation. For Lambri, photography became a means of preserving the time spent in an interior, the position at which her gaze stopped, and her emotional response to light as a sequence of images.

Reading Architecture as Autobiography and the Camera Position as Self-Portrait

Lambri has described architecture as autobiography and the site of photography as a form of self-portrait.^*2 Childhood memory, the experience of space through a female body, and an interest in modernism inform her choice of buildings. The self-portrait emerges without a person in the frame. Camera height, the limits of the image, and slight differences across a sequence convey how the photographer responded to the place. Photography carries an experience produced from a limited position to others without claiming ownership of a building through an exterior overview.

Modernist architecture promoted rationality, standardization, and transparency as principles that could be shared broadly, while its canon formed around male architects and idealized users. Architectural magazines and exhibitions often represented design intention through an unoccupied, newly completed overview, pushing lived bodies and time beyond the frame. Lambri enters houses and museums as a particular body and selects the height of an opening, the distance from the outside, and positions where sight is obstructed. PAC Milano identifies modernism, feminism, identity, and memory as central contexts for Autoritratto.^*3 Photographing the same building from positions only centimeters apart brings the question of who finds a space open, legible, or usable into view at a scale unavailable to the comprehensive architectural image.

Autoritratto: A Self-Portrait Made from Partial Views

The “self-portrait” of Autoritratto is constructed through the buildings Lambri chose, the time she spent there, the height of the camera, and what she excluded from the frame. A review in Mousse reads the exhibition as a layered image of the self that includes a reference to Carla Lonzi.^*4 A window or wall remains an architectural element. The camera position—including where she paused and the directions she excluded—becomes a self-portrait without a figure.

Following Changes in Perception through Closely Related Images

Photographs made in the same building may differ only in a few centimeters of position, exposure, or the temperature of light. In one frame, a window appears as a flat field of color; in the next, trees outside emerge; in another, an interior reflection moves forward. An e-flux review argues that Lambri’s images unsettle architectural scale, authorship, and the desire for mastery, translating emotional response into the frame.^*5 The small differences between nearly identical compositions register the fact that a view of architecture changes with time and bodily position.

Feminism as a Question of Authorship and Use

Reducing Lambri’s work to feminine, intimate detail opposed to a masculine overview would assign formal qualities to gender. Her photographs introduce the experience of users, photographers, and exhibition makers into institutions that treat the architect’s intention as the primary standard of interpretation. Materials from PAC and Harvard GSD identify the relation between space, human experience, and the politics of representation as a sustained concern.^*6 Feminism enters the work through the distribution of authority over how architecture is described; the quietness of the image alone carries no fixed gender.

Photographs that clearly present a building at the moment of completion have circulated widely in modern architectural publishing and exhibitions. Lambri’s frames include season, vegetation, display equipment, reflections, and the effects of time, recording the building as it continues to be used by others after design. In an Artforum conversation, she discusses the photographs she made inside the Met Breuer and the building’s current state in concrete terms.^*1 The architect’s name remains present, joined by experiences that the name alone cannot explain.

Locations: Joining the Address of a Building to the Photographer’s Position

The “locations” of Locations include a building’s address, the position selected by the photographer inside it, the moment of exposure, and the work’s rearrangement in the exhibition. The Menil Collection presented the work as an interpretation of space.^*7 When photographs of buildings by different architects are placed together, comparison rests on the gaze and bodily response each building elicited as much as on exterior form.

Breuer Revisited: Two Photographic Approaches within the Same Building

The Met Breuer occupied the former Whitney Museum designed by Marcel Breuer. Breuer Revisited brought together photographs of the building by Lambri and Bas Princen.^*8 Princen approached the building through a wider view of its urban and structural conditions; Lambri made several related images from restricted positions inside. In conversation, she has explained that the areas that attract her and the distance she chooses determine the work.^*1 Showing the two photographers in the same venue made the authorship of the original design, memories of the Whitney, the Met’s reuse of the building, and the routes taken by present-day visitors visible from different distances. ^*9

Lambri tends to remain inside a building and wait for light to change, producing several closely related frames, instead of visiting briefly to collect an exterior. The Hammer Museum describes her extended study of celebrated modernist buildings and her attention to the psychological and emotional responses they produce in inhabitants.^*10 Color distinguishes changes in the wall over time and the point at which a boundary dissolves into reflection; its role exceeds the accurate description of materials.

When nearly identical compositions appear together in a photobook or exhibition, the viewer compares their differences and never receives a single overview of the building. Editing—deciding which differences to retain and in what order—turns changes in perception during the visit into a sequence. Gallery Koyanagi likewise identifies time within architecture, varied light, and the photographer’s strong subjectivity as defining features of the work.^*11

The same opening can appear primarily as a plane, a recess, or a view outside depending on the hour. In Lambri’s work, light changes the relation between architecture and photographer. Her residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum similarly emphasized a subjective response to museum space and natural light.^*12

Holding Abstraction and the Specific Site in the Same Image

Lambri’s photographs approach lines, rectangles, and pale fields of color, at times resembling geometric abstraction. The work title, architect, location, and order of the series remain, preserving the relation to a specific building. Harvard GSD describes a movement between representation and abstraction through which the effect of space on human life is reconsidered.^*6 Abstraction redistributes what receives priority in vision while retaining information about the site.

Adding Experience and Duration to the Criteria of Architectural Photography

Fragmentary and subjective architectural photography existed before Lambri. Her historical position rests in the sustained photography of well-known modern buildings and in the establishment of partial views and sequences across museum exhibitions, photobooks, and architectural exhibitions. Reception at the Menil, the Met, the Hammer, and Kettle’s Yard brought knowledge derived from the photographer’s experience and duration of stay into circulation alongside architect-centered representative images.^*2

If the building in which an apparently abstract field was photographed were completely withheld, the critique of modernism and authorship would lose force. Lambri keeps each fragment tied to a particular work of architecture and to the canon it addresses. A work in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection likewise records Breuer’s museum architecture as its concrete point of departure.^*13 The combination of a specified place and an absent overview makes it possible to reread familiar architecture from another bodily position. ^*14

The absence of people can initially make the images appear neutral. Camera height, distance from the wall, the angle chosen to avoid a reflection, and time spent waiting indirectly register the photographer’s body. Lambri’s statement at Kettle’s Yard that she sees places as self-portraits describes this structure of absence with particular clarity.^*2 Viewers retrace the limited position from which someone stood, instead of surveying an idealized empty room.

Exhibition materials from CAC Vilnius, Luhring Augustine, and Thomas Dane Gallery document Lambri’s consistent development since the late 1990s of a method that divides one building into many closely related photographs and rearranges them for each venue.^*15*16*17*18 At the Baltimore Museum of Art and Carnegie Museum of Art, photographs of architecture were placed in relation to existing galleries, sculptures by other artists, and visitor movement. They operated less as diagrams of buildings than as objects that produced distance and obstruction for bodies in the room.^*19*20

The Manetti Shrem Museum exhibition The Museum as Process extends this concern by treating architectural design and photographic production as intertwined with the processes through which a museum is built, used, seen, and later documented.^*21