Photographic reproduction replaces the real building as the consumed object

Evidence

So it is that in our architectural histories and journals, we consume so many photographic images of the classical or modern buildings, coming at length to believe that these are somehow the things themselves. At least since Proust’s pictures of Venice we all try to retain our sensitivity to the constitutive visual deceptiveness of the photograph, whose frame and angle always give us something by comparison with which the building itself is always something distinct, something slightly different. All the more so is this true with color photography, where a new set of libidinal forces comes into play so that it is no longer even the building that is now consumed, having itself become a mere pretext for the intensities of the color stock and the gloss of the stiff paper. “The image,” said Debord in a famous theoretical move, “is the final form of commodity reification”; but he should have added, “the material image,” the photographic reproduction. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 316

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharply distinguishes the architect’s project drawing from the photograph as contrasting substitutes for the real building.
• XREF: connects to: Electronic reproduction stores images detached from context for instant mass retrieval — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2153; Seeing an object in its original place delivers a thrill no specimen can match — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 710