Sophie Dars and Carlo Menon, Stefano Graziani, and Yasufumi Nakamori present strategies for reimagining and employing visual formats such as the photo essay, the photo novel, and the photo exhibition. The event takes place in the framework of a CCA research project on the relationship between architecture and photography funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Sophie Dars and Carlo Menon are the editors of Accattone, an independent editorial project based in Brussels that recently released its fourth issue. According to its website, Accattone “is a dedicated space for architecture documents: an interview, a visual essay, a drawing are laid out as fragments of a montage transversal to the issue.” Each issue addresses several themes with a critical approach achieved through the confrontation of visual material. Deliberately tapping into the slowness of the printed format, the editors aim to combine the characteristics of the work-in-progress with the finiteness of the object.

Stefano Graziani is an artist and photographer who studied architecture at the IUAV in Venice. He teaches in the master program at the Fondazione Fotografia in Modena, at Naba in Milan, and at the University of Trieste. He has collaborated with architects, photographers, and groups such as Multiplicity, Armin Linke, Amedeo Martegani, and Stalker. A co-founder of San Rocco, he has been exhibited widely and has published portfolios in magazines and journals including Domus, A+U, Camera Austria, Repubblica, Log, and Abitare, among others. His published works include Taxonomies (2007), Under The Volcano and Other Stories (2009), L’Isola (2009), Studio d’archivio, Archivio Superstudio (2012), Memory Talks (2012), Conversazioni notturne (2014), and It seemed as though the mist itself had screamed (2014). He recently contributed to How Things Meet (2016), a publication on the construction of 51n4e’s TID tower in Tirana, Albania, and the CCA publication AP164: Ábalos&Herreros (2016).

Yasufumi Nakamori is an art historian who has been curator of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art since May 2016. His doctoral dissertation traces the emergence of the artistic imagination that envisioned an archetype of the city through four Japanese projects from the 1950s and 1960s. Part of this research was presented in the exhibition Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A book by the same title received the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award from the College Art Association. Nakamori has taught modern and contemporary Japanese art and architecture at Rice University and Hunter College, CUNY, and is currently working on a research project on Kenzo Tange funded by the Graham Foundation.