Paper Buildings
The camera scoops up a cross section of space-time; the photograph translates it into two dimensions. There is no neutral way of effecting this conversion; every camera image bends space and stops time in some stylized way. A vogue for eccentric perspectives arose in photography in the 1920s, and many architectural writers denounced it. Bird’s-eye, worm’s-eye, and corner-angle views, the critics charged, reduced photography to lifeless—timeless—graphic design: a school of “paper architecture” imprisoned on the printed page.
Today, the extreme perspectives that announced modernism’s break from the past are used to fuel nostalgia for modernism itself. An equally influential way of bundling space-time is seen in Ed Ruscha’s twenty-seven-foot-long foldout view of the Sunset Strip, which simulates the cool, frameless, drifting viewpoint of a passenger in traffic.
