Alvar Aalto ja Gustaf Welinin valokuvan talo

In this article, I research the role of Gustaf Welin's architectural photography in the formation of Aino and Alvar Aalto's world fame from 1928 to 1935. This is the first extensive study of the little-known Welin. With their exceptionally good knowledge of photography, the Aaltos understood the significance of modern photography in the marketing of architecture and also participated in production of Welin's photographs. Welin's photographs, which were prominently featured in international publications, were part of the ‘image architecture’ that took shape in the architectural press in the 1930s. I introduce the concept of “house of the photograph” for examining architecture published as photographs, which is more suitable for interpreting architectural photography than reproduction. The theoretical framework for the study is Walter Benjamin's Reproduktionsbarkeit, where the production and interpretation of reproducible art can involve multiple ‘auteurs’.