Isn’t it strange how so many photographs that represent space – that take space, place or architecture as their subject – lack the very thing they purport to represent? Is it not also strange that the very sense of presence – the existence in space (and, therefore, also time) – cedes ground to description and the detailing of materials? Might this have foregrounded, precipitated even, the notion of architecture or site as image, rendering the photograph unnecessarily flat in the process? Can space find its place on the seemingly flat surface of the photograph?

Since Alberti, the production of perspective has generated a western pictorial tradition emphasising optical accuracy and enhanced verisimilitude. It rests upon the fundamental flatness of an image’s material support. Though logical and mathematical, imagery remains ultimately illusionistic. It diminishes the discourse surrounding its own making or its own presence. Through seamless technical competence it gives way to the ‘effect of reality’ over ‘reality’ itself. Such is the tradition into which photography was, of course, born. We might, however, consider what constitutes a realist photograph. For example, one that resembles the space of the world or one that exists in space within it?

Swiss artist Renate Buser has taken architecture and space as subjects in her rigorous and spatially affective practice. Living in Basel and working internationally, Buser has produced projects exploring the legacy of both classical and modernist and, especially, concrete architectures. She returns photography to three and four dimensions, building or bending the image to create space, and situating works to alter acutely the sense of their site. Buser has developed a practice that produces smaller, portable works that respond to and build upon the traditions of the gallery picture alongside situated works the size of their respective architectures.

In her work for the gallery and museum, Buser explores how an image might move between pictured and actual space. It was the Art Historian Hans Belting who suggested that Thomas Struth’s iconic Museum Photographs contained three spaces simultaneously: a space contained in front of the photograph and occupied by the viewer; the space contained within his image (typically a classical museum); the space within a classical, representational painting that forms the central focus of the series. What Belting does not note, however, is that those spaces remain discrete; separated from one another with the lack of causality, consequence and contingency that makes an image act beyond being spectacle or window. In Buser’s project such spaces are folded in together. Waterside Plaza Relief (2015) is an image of the New York high-rise with its stacked vertical and twisting planes of glass and brick. The tower is seen from one perspective however its shifting surfaces allude to the multiple planes of space that it occupies. In an echo that is neither illusionistic nor imitative – its only tell-tale sign from the front is the shadow the work casts on the wall – Buser bends the image, keeping the picture intact whilst generating spatial presence. Beyond appearing to create space or fool the eye – no sense of pictorial magic is at work here – Buser gives the picture on the wall a space of its own; a presence that is generated by the image and its place in the room simultaneously.

Let’s recall the material supports of picture-making that would have been commonplace when Alberti formalized perspective. Modes of picturing could be separated: the fresco on the one hand and the painted wooden panel, fabric, or paper on the other. Such distinctions are significant because they are marked by location; they consider critically the moment and site of reception, as the fresco exists for onsite, while the painting remains nomadic, even promiscuous. We have seen already that Buser reestablishes space in the portable image, but it is also true and significant that she adopts the potentialities of the fresco, demonstrating a photography that can respond to, and intervene in, architecture itself.

In a series of public installations, the logic of the fresco is extended as an embedded architectural image. A situated image brings new space into architecture and reconfigures the sense and perception of space within and around it. Taking the side elevation of a structure, Buser fills it with an image that shifts the architecture of the building. In Rue du Panorama 4 (2008), the side façade of a building becomes punctured with a view of its interior; the space is folded outwards and shifted vertically. Similarly, Gläserner Saalbau (2013) involves the transferring of one part of a site to another. Heidelberg Castle’s Gesprengter Turm is transported around the façade to its Crystal Hall of the title. In another body of work, including Silo à livres (2009), we notice that Buser uses photography to cut hypothetically through an actual building. Re-presenting the façade at an ever more oblique angle, she enacts a cutting without cutting that recalls Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974). Such spatial interventions reveal a photography that exists in dialogue with architecture, able to work upon it as well as describe it. A tilt-shift of the camera, made manifest in its impact upon the building, reveals space by producing a tangible new sensorial and perspectival experience, which places photography beyond the ‘that has been’ of representation into the folded histories and as-yet-unrealised potentialities of a medium in the world.