The work of the American painter Jackson Pollock speaks to us not only through exhibitions of paintings hung on gallery walls, but also through the films and photographs [1] of Hans Namuth which exposed Pollock's phased working process to the public. In the first of two distinct phases Pollock is seen immersed in, and in intimate interaction with, a large horizontal canvas. This records traces of his movement and expressive gestures in heterogeneous media. A second phase is then triggered by a pivotal operation: the horizontal recording and working surface is transposed to a vertical viewing plane. Leo Steinberg recounts that Pollock: ‘would tack the canvas on to a wall – to get acquainted with it, he used to say; to see where it wanted to go. He lived with the painting in its uprighted state, as with a world confronting his human posture’.

Recollecting Landscapes is a rephotographic survey project which documents a century of landscape transformation in Belgium. It is based on the successive photography of sixty sites at three moments in time between 1904 and 2004 [1, 2]. This paper takes the project as a starting point to investigate the subject of the image and its presentation. This means that the text develops some thoughts on how the images in the project are displayed and read, rather than on the content they display.

The question of the nature of knowledge is vital in understanding the relation between research and practice. This question is vital, not least for architectural researchers since they often have to struggle with a rationalist ideal that research-based knowledge must be context-independent. But architects ‘know’ that this kind of knowledge does not cover the need for knowledge in architecture and design, a field between the humanities, social sciences and technology. Several volumes of arq contain articles and letters on this subject.

The desire to learn about buildings, cities and cultural artefacts by journeying to experience them in situ pervades architectural history. It can be seen in the rise of the grand tour in the eighteenth century, subsequent formalised academic study tours, the ascendancy of cultural museums in the nineteenth century, and the institutionalisation of heritage sites and attractions in the twentieth century. More informally, such journeys are pursued in personal and less prescriptive ways through habitual urban strolling and site-seeing.

While waiting for class two years ago one of my students looked at the back of the room where two unused slide projectors stood. ‘But’, he wondered out loud – having no history of comparative slide projection – ‘how come you have two of them?’ His remark speaks directly to the rapid change from print to pixel and about the transformation of the lecture room, the place where this change has been most sharply felt: pixels are our daily habit, our night-time curse, and our weekend distraction.

I wanted to get into the real world – not that the Jane Drew world was very real, considering what was going on. We were fiddling around with six, I think it was, wartime agricultural cottages and then Jane got this famous job of Kitchen Consultant to the Gas Council. She was appointed to do kitchens because women architects were supposed to know about kitchens.

The prompt circulation of images and representations of buildings has not only expanded the audience for architecture, but has also become a critical tool which – quite beyond the architect's reach – is more influential than the ideas, concepts and buildings they represent. Images have become such an important element that they are not only the primary medium through which most architectural works first engage an audience, but their circulation has come to precede the act of building. The mass dissemination of architectural imagery has enabled a consumption of architecture which has not only transformed buildings into culture, but also ensured a significant displacement in architectural reception. While in prior years the dissemination of images took place after the built object, recently, the diffusion of imagery not only precedes the building, but also conditions its reception.

There is little question that we live in an age of images, in a mediated environment in which the image is ever-present – with its effects nevertheless still growing [1]. This essay – as an introduction to the four papers that follow – examines aspects of the complex questions surrounding the image and those that accompany the shift from print to pixel.