The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project

curated by Bas Princen and Stefano Graziani

CCA
Canadian Centre for Architecture
Montreal

The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project is the first of a trilogy of research and exhibition projects produced by the CCA on the medium of photography—between work of art, research tool, and document—as a means to investigate the built environment. In light of the pioneering efforts the CCA has made since its foundation in redefining the role of photography within the field of architecture as well as within research institutions and collections, the project is conceived as a display of open research where works of authors from the 1970s until today—from the CCA collection and beyond—are presented together with unpublished projects, books, publication mock-ups, interviews, and documents connected to the production of the works themselves.

The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project embraces the idea of the documentary as an embedded quality of photographic language, and questions the relevance and actuality of photography as a means to interrogate and interpret the mechanisms that are modelling our visible world.

Authors: Lara Almarcegui; Lewis Baltz; Gabriele Basilico, Stefano Boeri; Bernd and Hilla Becher; Lynne Cohen; Luigi Ghirri; Dan Graham; Jan Groover; Guido Guidi; Naoya Hatakeyama; Takashi Homma; Roni Horn; Douglas Huebler; Annette Kelm; Gert Jan Kocken; Aglaia Konrad; Susanne Kriemann; Sol LeWitt; Armin Linke; Ari Marcopoulos; Gordon Matta-Clark; Richard Misrach; Marianne Mueller; Bruce Nauman; Michael Schmidt; Thomas Struth; Tokuko Ushioda; Jeff Wall; Marianne Wex.