A Field Measure Survey of American Architecture constructs a fictional road trip across the United States drawn entirely from the Historic American Buildings Survey archive held in the US Library of Congress — nearly half a million photographs and documents repurposed as a portrait of a democracy under strain.
About This Book
Jeffrey Ladd mines the HABS archive not as a historian but as an artist with a political conscience. Weaving north and south across the Mason-Dixon line and pressing west, the book assembles archival photographs into an imagined one-way journey that is simultaneously documentary and fictional. Inspired by Walker Evans's social documentary practice and the architectural interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark, Ladd exploits the inherent muteness of photographs to open an ambiguous space where the sculptural, the forensic, and the political converge. What reads as a single authorial voice is revealed to belong to dozens of makers; what appears distant in time proves uncomfortably close to the present. Essential reading for anyone engaged with photographic archives, American architectural history, or the intersection of landscape and democratic fragility.
Key Features
- 368 pages of archival documentary photography drawn from the Historic American Buildings Survey
- Authored by Jeffrey Ladd, with source material from the US Library of Congress
- Published by MACK, ISBN 9781913620417
What You'll Discover
- How the HABS archive — nearly half a million photographs and documents — can be reconstituted as political and artistic argument rather than neutral record
- The tension between individual authorship and collective making, as a seemingly singular photographic voice splinters into dozens of distinct hands
- The influence of Walker Evans's social documentary tradition and Gordon Matta-Clark's architectural interventions on Ladd's editorial and visual approach
- How American vernacular architecture becomes a landscape of both beauty and fragility, implicating the present moment as much as the historical record
About the Author
Jeffrey Ladd is a photographer and writer whose practice engages critically with photographic archives and documentary traditions. In this work, he draws on the Historic American Buildings Survey to construct a layered portrait of the United States that moves between the sculptural, the political, and the fictional.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 368
- Dimensions: 232 x 170 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781913620417
- Publisher: MACK
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Photographers and architects drawn to documentary practice, scholars of American architectural history, and readers interested in how photographic archives carry political and cultural meaning beyond their original intent.