Focusing on the beginnings of photography, James S. Ackerman explores what photography introduced to the conventions of architectural representation and what were the sources of this new system of vision. The subject of Ackerman’s lecture springs from his research on architectural photography and on the origins of the conventions of architectural drawing.

James S. Ackerman is Professor Emeritus, Harvard University. One of America’s most distinguished historians of art and architecture, Ackerman taught at the University of California at Berkeley and has been Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University since 1961. He has also been Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge, Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, Meyer Schapiro Visiting Professor of Art History at Columbia University, and Visiting Professor of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Ackerman’s publications include The Cortile del Belvedere (1954), The Architecture of Michelangelo (1961), Palladio (1966), The Villa: Form Ideology of Country Houses (1990), Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture (1991), and Conventions of Architectural Drawing: Representation and Misrepresentation (2000). Ackerman was awarded a Balzan Prize for his work on the history of architecture in 2001.

James Ackerman was a CCA Mellon Senior Fellow in 2001.