PHOTOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES FOR ARCHITECTURE REPRESENTATION: A DIDACTIC EXPERIENCE

In this paper we give account of an experience in didactics which has been carried on starting from a master degree dissertation and then transferred upon a Bac level third year class in "Innovativa Instruments for Design Representation" during the first semester of academic year 2012-2013.
As a preliminary path, the students have been given a workshop where different techniques and semantic results in picture taking has been shown and discussed.
Document or interpretation? The debate is still alive and more heated than ever, especially given the new opportunities offered by the advent of digital - from the eighties - which actually coincided with the death of historical photography: it is missing the negative - The real "deus ex machina" of the photographic representation has disappeared and has been replaced by a sequence of numerical data.
There is no more similarity between reality and its representation, as both were attributable to the negative, the image has been transformed from loyal into disloyal. The digital technology has also brought a great revolution constituted by the merger between the still camera and the camera: the decisive moment and the whole motion share the same instrument.
Between documents and interpretation in the work of contemporary photographers of architecture today it preveals the category of the story, achieved through the series of images in sequence.
Starting from this base, students have been given a structured parameter grid for taking pictures at two different targets.
1. the widely known "Brion Grave" by Arch. Carlo Scarpa in Altivole (TV);
2. the "Vittoriale" by Arch. Luigi Maroni, in Gardone (BS) where the famous poet Gabriele D'Annunzio used to live;
The pictures has been taken with both digital and analogic cameras, with a defined set of different optics and different setups for shutter and time.
The goal of this experience is to let the students build up a set of pictures which could give a complete coverage of the outstanding details of each of the four relevant architectures they had to deal with. This is important for two different aims: survey for preservation and preparation of a data set for semantic analisys, towards a possible project in the area.
The students were put in touch with both sides and taught to produce different results to fulfill different needs.