Lights, Camera, Architecture: Hedrich Blessing and the Production of Immaterial Structure

“Lights, Camera, Architecture” considers notions of materiality and immateriality in relation to architecture, light, and shadow in the early photography of Hedrich Blessing, a commercial photography studio founded in Chicago in 1929. It focuses primarily on Hedrich Blessing’s early photographs of the Palmolive Building and structures at the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition. In these images, architecture aggressively announces itself through projections of artificial light but also disappears into a black, shadowy void. Through photography, buildings are immortalized and made to intervene in the perceptual experience of the present but simultaneously announce their distance in time and space as mere reproductions of a unique event and object. The materiality of the architecture represented in Hedrich Blessing’s photographs is thus complicated on many levels. This paper considers the role of photography and the contrivances of light and shadow in producing an architecture that oscillates between what archaeologist Severin Fowles might describe as “thing” and “non-thing,” material entity and immaterial essence, a simultaneous presence and absence. The paper interrogates the cultural and social specificity of light in order to understand the implications of this architectural paradox captured on film. It also looks at the ways in which photographs have been theorized as expressions of spatial and material presence and absence; the history of architectural illumination; advertising in the twentieth century; and the popular adaptation of avant-garde aesthetics in photography. Ultimately, it makes the argument that light, shadow, and photography were deployed together to bring modern architecture into the mainstream.