Supervisor HfK:
Prof. Dr. Annette Geiger
Supervisor University of Johannesburg:
Prof. Dr. Ruth Sacks
Built structures reveal how societies organise power, desire, and ideology. This PhD thesis investigates African modernist architecture from the late 1940’s to the 1980s and contemporary architecture late 1990’s to present and asks how architectural photography can function as a research method rather than an illustration of architecture.
The dissertation would be structured in two parts. Part One develops a thesis driven historical study of “Architecture of Independence”. It examines the era after colonialism, as manifested in development shaped by two opposing Cold War ideologies in the East and the West. Development that was seldom altruistic. Furthermore it examines how photographs helped construct heroic narratives of modernism during the Cold War. Part Two is guided by inquiry and grounded in practice, thus the aim would be to make the perceivable perceptible. It treats the ethical and methodological problem of photographing contemporary “Architecture by Africans” as the core research problem. Rather than claiming a decolonial solution in advance, the project investigates how a photographer and researcher, personally implicated in histories of colonial visuality, approach this field through collaboration with African* architects and African photographers. The thesis combines archival research, visual analysis, field photography, interviews and reflexive process documentation. It will result in a written dissertation alongside artistic outputs such as photographic series in an exhibition and book format. The contribution is twofold, it demonstrates how images shape architectural historiography and develops and tests collaborative methods for accountable photographic practice.