The complex historical interaction between photography and architectural practice is reduced to the still moment of photographic exposure. The fastidious details of photo-historical connoisseurship which accompanied the images provided the signs of scholarship, but it is an exhibition of little thought.
The sources of that movement in photography called “social landscape”, with which Tom Gibson, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and others are associated, have not been adequately articulated. The fine photography tradition of social documentary, which as Gibson says, “goes back to Atget”, has been chronicled; yet the tradition alone does not account for this seemingly unpromising collection of snapshot images of the unremarkable, routine daily life with which these photographers would appear to be concerned.