“An African view” : the photography of Denise Scott Brown

Abstract

This article develops on the plenary paper we presented for the second Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene Symposium (MoHoA), held at the Bartlett School of Architecture(UCL) October 26–28, 2022. At the first MOHoA Symposium in Cape Town in 2021 titled Learning from Steinkopf, we invoked Learning from Las Vegas (by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izneour, published in 1972) to consider South African architect Roelof Uytenbogaardt's award-winning 1975 Steinkopf Community Centre building in the desert in South Africa. In the process of this research we pay attention to Scott Brown's multiple contributions beyond architecture and urban design. In this article we explore the extraordinary complexity and complicity of the life and work of Denise Scott Brown through her photography. She was born, brought up and educated in Africa, after which the major part of her career was in the United States, where she is known and celebrated as a great American architect. Our article follows her life and career through a consideration not of her architectural interventions nor buildings, but of her photographs, which have become the subject of more recent attention. As a woman who photographed at a time when the global field was almost completely dominated by men, her practice as a photographer spans many decades across the African and North American continents. Documenting her projects and sites, her photographs were intended as teaching materials for use in her lectures on architecture, planning, landscape and art history. We suggest that, viewed differently, her photographs speak to questions of societal modernity and inequalities that are also informed by her southern African experiences. In the 1990s Scott Brown claimed, “I have an African's view of Las Vegas.” From our location as an architect and a photographer working in Africa now, in this research we learn from Scott Brown's Las Vegas, her images of the city and desert and her photographic archive.