Conventional architectural photography often idealizes buildings and erases human presence, so notes Mary N. Woods in her recent book, Beyond the Architect's Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment. As an architectural historian, Woods attempts to negotiate more interdisciplinary terrain by placing modern architecture alongside developments in the visual arts, urban studies and cultural geography from the 1890s to the 1940s. Whereas similar studies have relied solely on dominant urban landscapes, that overwhelming obsession with “skyscraper culture,” or else images that mostly represent deserted, neutralized buildings and spaces, what the author refers to as the “scopic conventions” to cater to the architect's supreme vision, Woods is more interested in the culture of images that mediated the American built environment up until World War II, exploring rather those photographers who complicate the heart of American iconography – that foggy but spectacular New York skyline, those absolute Frank Lloyd Wright shots, and the FSA versions of southern life. Ultimately, she examines the convergence of these two crafts within the modernist enterprise not only to probe photography's power “to weave time and human presence back into the built environment” (xxiv), but equally to trace how our built environments are shaped just as much by their users and observers as by the original designers and builders (xxxii).

The book is divided into three substantial chapters running in roughly chronological order: each profiling a different site (the “new” New York of the early 1900s, the rural South of the 1920s–1930s, and a burgeoning Miami of the late 1930s–1940s) and photographer (Alfred Stieglitz, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Marion Post Wolcott), though Woods adeptly fills out each scene with a number of photographers, either from within related circles or, more effectively, with counterpoints who provide alternate portraits of place. This is particularly the case with the second chapter on the Old South, with Woods's bid to pin the work of Frances Benjamin Johnston against the more iconic images of Walker Evans, Margaret Bourne-White and other FSA-bred photographers, as well as lesser-known contemporaries such as Henry Clay Anderson and Eudora Welty, only an amateur photographer at the time. In a similar vein, and where she offers her most insightful, hearty analysis, the third chapter looks at Wolcott's images of migrant workers and early boomtown life in the “Magic City” of Miami, then situates her work with that of the more commercially driven Samuel Gottscho and Max Waldman to better examine those paradoxical identities intensely brewing in south Florida. While the first chapter more predictably discusses the high-profile figures (Stieglitz, Paul Strand) who set the mark for American art photography, Woods does complicate this canon of urban imagery with questions of gendered perspective by following through with leading woman photographers of the period, namely Helen Levitt, Bernice Abbott, and Lisette Model, whose conflictual portraits of “the city as performer” blur the distinction between Lefebvre's notion of “representational space (created by human use) and representations of space (imposed spatial order)” (80). And, indeed, this analysis of a gendered and spatially lived perspective – and in turn, how the photographic equivalents have been appropriated by the American canon – carries its momentum into the next two chapters, but to quite different targets: the infiltration of the past by the present in a Jim Crow South, and the tabula rasa of Miami in great socioeconomic flux.

The overall layout is quite superb, with the text generously supported by 140 black-and-white photographs; in addition, there is a high-quality, twenty-one-plate colour insert for those images most critical to her argument. While the conclusion does venture interesting links with contemporary photographers such as Jeff Wall and Thomas Ruff who are dramatically changing the scope of architectural photography today, it would have been helpful to see more than brief speculation as to how and why these shifts have occurred over the decades in between modernity and the present moment, and perhaps a more extensive reading of this resurgence of European photographic (Bernd and Hilla Becher and their protégés, that is) and architectural influences upon the American built environment. Yet this is a minor point to make given the overwhelming breadth of research and argument already delivered in the preceding chapters with Woods's telling analysis of so many photographers and photographs of buildings that not only occupy space but also fuse past, present and human experience.