Photographs of Silos: On the Contingency of a Modern Photographic Canon

This article re-examines the dissemination of the photographs and their subsequent reproduction of the now-canonical grain elevators and published in the early 20th century. For example, Walter Gropius used them as illustrations for his article in the 1913 Werkbund yearbook, while Le Corbusier included them in Vers une architecture. While the idea of a canon made up of buildings is widely accepted within architecture discourse, this article identifies and stresses the role of photographic canons as a means of further challenging these constructions. The article focuses on the moment when the reproductions of these photographs became canonical and on the mechanisms that such a construct implied. The photo reproductions were objects of trade and exchange, mobilised in relation to photographic media and different platforms for dissemination. On the one hand, this informed their reading as architectural and thus singular objects; on the other, the different materialisations of photo reproductions testify to their nature as commodities and objects of trade, and therefore to the consolidation of their canonical status.