How do photographers select, order, and display their images to make visual arguments about built and natural environments? Conceived as part of a long-term project at the CCA to examine the contemporary role of photography in the study and practice of architecture, The Lives of Documents — Photography as Project prompts reflections on the idea of the documentary as an embedded quality of photography. Tracing the research materials, archiving practices, and production processes of diverse authors, photographers Bas Princen and Stefano Graziani highlight a selection of photographic projects that model our visible world by investigating notions of landscape and its destruction, global infrastructure, intimacy and interiority, and conditions of urban and domestic space and life.

This publication follows Princen and Graziani’s travels to understand how artists use photography as a tool for their artistic research and how they conceive of their projects as evolving and expanding explorations. Bringing together studio visit images, artist interviews, and Princen and Graziani’s own reproduction of photographic projects, it emphasizes how photography reveals and expresses lived and built realities in ways that traditional architectural tools fail to represent or communicate.

Editors: Stefano Graziani and Bas Princen

With contributions from Stefano Boeri, Guido Guidi, Naoya Hatakeyama, Takashi Homma, Roni Horn, Annette Kelm, Gert Jan Kocken, Aglaia Konrad, Susanne Kriemann, Armin Linke, Ari Marcopoulos, Richard Misrach, Marianne Mueller, Phyllis Lambert, Tokuko Ushioda, and Jeff Wall

Graphic design: Ponik Peeters

Co-published with Koenig Books

Related exhibition: The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project