Photography and the Built Environment is a study on the relationship between photography and design. My research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach informed by the methodology of cultural analysis. This book analyzes the longstanding and often dialectic relationship between photography and the built environment. Specifically, it argues that when used as social practice, photography is a significant tool to investigate the built environment that provides insight into understandings about space and place by both their architects and their photographers. This study is not a historical survey or an overview of the photographic medium in relationship to the subject of architecture. Instead, it is a reflection on some bodies of work by photographers whose practices engage with the fascinating intersection of photography with the built environment.

It contains three central themes: ‘Histories and Narratives,’ ‘Decategorizing and Metaphor’ and ‘Issues and Agency.’ Each section provides a close reading informed by a cultural analysis perspective of photographs concerning concepts that include placemaking, mise-en-scene, narrative, settlement, and surveillance as well as issues such as photographic social activism and its relationship to the built environment. Selected images related to these ideas are examined from the work of both historic and contemporary photographers including Carleton Watkins, Frederick Evans, Eugène Atget, Charles Marville, Linnaeus Tripe, Gabor Szilasi, Geoffrey James, Bern and Hilla Becher, Kenneth O’Halloran, Lynne Cohen, Candida Hofer, Anthony Haughey, Donovan Wylie and Dawoud Bey.