In Search of the Ordinary

Denise Scott Brown is perhaps most recognized for her writings and design projects, both of which effected transformative change in the world of architecture in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Less known is her extensive photographic practice, which she first developed in her hometown of Johannesburg in the 1950s and continued over the subsequent decades. This practice is the subject of the new book Encounters: Denise Scott Brown Photographs (Lars Müller Publishers, 2025), edited by Izzy Kornblatt, which collects nearly 400 of Scott Brown’s photographs from the formative decades of her career. An accompanying exhibition, which pairs Scott Brown’s photographs with archival material and work by other designers and artists, is on view at the Yale School of Architecture from January to July 2026.

Encounters, which is organized and sequenced through a set of thematic categories developed by Kornblatt and Scott Brown, makes the case that Scott Brown’s photographic practice was about much more than documentation. Rather, it was itself a practice of design—of confronting, observing, and framing the world, and finding places within it for architects and designers to intervene. In an essay accompanying the photographs, titled “In Search of the Ordinary,” Kornblatt focuses on Scott Brown’s interest in the everyday, exploring what it means for an architect who occupies a privileged social position to observe and document “ordinary” people and places. The following excerpt is drawn from the middle of the essay.

Denise Scott Brown purchased the Alpa camera that she would bring with her around the world around 1957 in a shop in downtown Johannesburg, the city where she was raised, attended college, met her first husband Robert Scott Brown, and worked briefly in an architecture office before departing for the United States.¹ Many of the earliest photographs she took with it were fragments of South African life: billboards by the side of a winding road, a busy commercial thoroughfare, children at play, vistas of the rolling green veld. One does not find much estrangement between photographer and subject here—this was, after all, Scott Brown’s own ordinary world, even if she looked at it, composed it, with an acutely trained disciplinary eye. Where that estrangement does emerge is in those photographs where the realities of Apartheid, and the lives of Black South Africans, become visible. In such photographs—of rows of identical township housing, of men and women performing manual labor, of the jumbled landscape of power plants and mine dumps on Johannesburg’s outskirts, to name but a few examples—the ordinary no longer seems familiar in quite the same way, and Scott Brown’s gaze takes on the focused curiosity of one intent on studying the unknown. And here the estrangement engendered by Scott Brown’s disciplinary eye, her desire to document and understand ways of building and using space, is inseparable from the asymmetrical relation between a white photographer and Black subjects, an asymmetry inescapable in the context of Apartheid for even those with the best of intentions.²

These particular photographs are important in part because they make visible the flows of resources and instruments of social and economic control that characterized Apartheid South Africa, even if one sometimes has to know what to look for. For instance, a set of photographs that at first appears to show moments of traditional tribal life in a Ndebele village near Pretoria—women working to grade pathways and paint striking, colorful patterns on earthen walls—in fact has a fraught backstory. The village seen in these photographs, known to residents as KwaMsiza and to white South Africans as Mapoch, was forcibly relocated under Apartheid policy in the early 1950s after white landowners sold its original site for the construction of an airport. The village was, as the photographs show, proudly built by its residents using indigenous techniques. Yet even its physical form was marked by Apartheid: the new site was not suitable for agriculture on the scale needed to sustain the village, and its “authentic” aesthetics instead became the basis for a tourist economy catering to white South Africans and foreigners.³

In another enigmatic photograph, a group of Black South African men in working clothes huddle on a concrete sidewalk in front of what appears to be a large downtown building. One immediately gets the feeling that these men, tightly, even defensively grouped, do not feel at home in their surroundings. Indeed, as Scott Brown recalls, the men were forced to spend their lunch hour outside because they were not allowed to enter downtown restaurants, and they instead passed the time playing a game with stones on the sidewalk.⁴ Viewers of the photograph do not, however, catch a glimpse of the game. Our view is instead from above, from the height of one standing and literally looking down toward the men, and their bodies block us from obtaining a clear picture of what they are doing. If the photograph wants to see, to penetrate the situation with its strategic view, the men seem to respond with the tactical move of closing ranks, of preserving a modicum of privacy in a space of relentless exposure.

There is then, a back-and-forth dynamic at play, and one that illustrates the mechanism through which Scott Brown’s photographic study of the ordinary more broadly seeks to obtain the knowledge from which it will draw lessons. This photograph, and others like it, expose both the privileged position of the person behind the camera and the way in which that privilege is enabled through the view it takes of the people in front. They present to the viewer a debt, a debt that grows precipitously in a case when differences of race, class, or other hierarchies of power are overlaid upon it—which is, of course, the case not just in South Africa but everywhere else too, as Scott Brown herself noted.⁵ The question with which she wrestled, then, was how that debt might be repaid: what does one who seeks to study and learn from the ordinary owe in return? And from this question emerges an ethics of design.

Consider a photograph by Scott Brown taken in Philadelphia, likely around 1964, which shows three Black children standing some five to ten meters from the camera, facing forward in a wide dirt pit. Debris littered around them mark this as the site of a recent demolition, as does the exposed party wall of a three-story building that looms behind. For on it linger the remnants of the demolished building: rectangles of plaster in pastel hues of green, pink, blue, and yellow, separated by lines of exposed brick that mark the former location of floors and walls (horizontal and vertical) and stairs (diagonal). A few pieces of peeling wallpaper remain half-adhered to the wall, and cement patches mark where wood joists were once pocketed. The surface, in short, is a full-scale section drawing, complete with scale figures.

The children look happy enough. The tallest of the three, a boy dressed in a red button-down shirt, confidently faces the camera with his hands on his hips—the same pose struck by Scott Brown in her famous portrait in front of the Las Vegas skyline. As in that portrait, a sense of curiosity and discovery pervades the image. This fleeting encounter between the photographer and these children has been produced by a change in the fabric of the city, and it occurs in a temporary and off-limits space available only to the inquisitive and intrepid. Yet this is North Philadelphia, not Las Vegas, and these children—we assume—are locals, not visitors. At first glance, their exploration looks like a form of play, a way of passing the hot, humid days of the mid-Atlantic summer: a brief episode of everyday neighborhood life. Scott Brown, by contrast, plays the roles of tourist, and of data gatherer or ethnographer. As this and many of her other photographs attest, she was a curious and attentive traveler who sought the touristic pleasures of sightseeing and self-edification not just in the traditional stops on the European Grand Tour but in ordinary places all around the world; for her, everything about these places was novel and interesting, worthy of examination.⁶ Channeling and perhaps heightening this curiosity was the systematic process Scott Brown undertook of making it useful, of using it to propose and test theories about planning and design. Photographs like this one represent a critical part of Scott Brown’s “field work,” and indeed both the taking and the subsequent examination and presentation of this photo would go on in a small way to inform a debate within the design disciplines over how places like North Philadelphia and its residents should be seen and understood. Further complicating matters, that debate would in this case be enabled, supported and hosted by a university that was itself implicated in Philadelphia’s urban renewal programs—that itself orchestrated dozens of demolitions similar to that seen in this photograph.

1964 was a year of hope and of violence. The civil rights movement sweeping the country was met with white supremacist murders and bombings; nonetheless, Lyndon B. Johnson would in July sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, formally prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race. But discrimination took many forms that remained unaddressed, not least among them urban renewal policies that in Philadelphia, as in other cities across the country, entailed the wholesale clearing of Black areas over which powerful white institutions sought control. Not far from North Philadelphia, one such institution was the University of Pennsylvania, which Scott Brown had come to the United States to attend, and which had since employed her to teach courses.⁷ That Penn was guilty of a sweeping scheme of property dispossession in its own neighborhood was not lost on Scott Brown. For her, the glaring problems of racial injustice in America and the role of institutions like universities in perpetuating them were familiar from her formative decades spent in South Africa. Of course, however, in both South Africa and the United States, the white, educated and well-off Scott Brown occupied a position of privilege. If she faced discrimination on the basis of her sex within the male-dominated world of architecture and planning, she was at the same time afforded the luxury of treating racial politics from the intellectual remove of one who does not fear for one’s life or experience the routine humiliations of racism.

In taking photographs like this one, then, Scott Brown had no choice but to represent a discipline implicated in violence on multiple levels, from that of university-prompted “slum clearance” in West Philadelphia to the broader role of planning and architecture in eagerly promoting, and then willingly executing, such schemes nationwide. In Michael Rothberg’s useful term, Scott Brown herself was thus an “implicated subject”: neither a victim nor a perpetrator, she nonetheless became, by virtue of her role within the university and the design disciplines, one whose “actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators.”⁸ Photographs like this one, understood in the context of the time, make visible the specific contours of this implication. Beyond simply exposing the violence wrought on city inhabitants, the removal of their homes and uprooting of their lives, the photograph contrasts the helplessly small figures of the children against the building section behind them; the defiant gaze of the red-shirted boy is overshadowed by the vast apparatus of demolition, planning, and rebuilding with which the photographer herself is associated.

How, then, does Scott Brown justify entering this place and taking photos of its inhabitants? What, for her, saves this practice from veering into exploitative territory? The answer lies in what Rothberg terms “transfiguring implication,”⁹ which for Scott Brown means using the knowledge gathered in her study of ordinary places to make the case for practices of design that better treat those places. The courses in which Scott Brown most frequently used photographs of life in Philadelphia were her fall 1963 and 1964 Form, Forces, and Functions studios, in which students were asked to study and then redesign a small section of West Philadelphia adjacent to the Penn campus: the point was precisely to avoid the harms of urban renewal.¹⁰ In a professional capacity, Scott Brown sought to make similar use of photography. She did so in 1963 in studying the efforts of a suburban charitable group called the Neighborhood Garden Association, which believed it could improve life in Philadelphia through an extensive program of gardening education.¹¹ She did so in her well-known community planning project for Philadelphia’s South Street, undertaken later in the 1960s. And she did so in North Philadelphia, too, where the impetus for her coming to take photographs in the early 1960s was the Penn-affiliated landscape architect Karl Linn, another critic of urban renewal whose own work of the time involved organizing residents of struggling neighborhoods to make low-cost improvements to vacant lots. In Scott Brown’s recollection, the children seen here were not just there to play: they had been recruited by Linn to help turn the lot into a makeshift park.¹² For Scott Brown, then, they appear both as victims of the design disciplines at their worst and as avatars of a promising alternative—of a way of designing that would distinguish itself precisely through its attention to people like these children, one that would be participatory, bottom-up, sensitive.

More broadly, Scott Brown’s practice of photography became part of an ethical movement within architecture and planning that styled itself against a stifling and conformist mode of urban renewal as making room for the variegations of modern life. If “learning from popular culture does not remove the architect from his or her status in high culture,” as the authors of Learning from Las Vegas have it, it may at least “alter high culture to make it more sympathetic to current needs and issues.”¹³ Or as Scott Brown acidly put it in a 1971 response to criticisms made by Kenneth Frampton: “Ken must pardon us for believing that learning to like Las Vegas for its body will help us to understand how to be gentle with the body of South Street and hence with the lives of its occupants.”¹⁴

We are dealing here with an ethics rooted, in the end, in the notion of design as a form of medical treatment. The metaphor of the city as organic body, familiar from the work of Lewis Mumford and others, is invoked not for the sake of pathologizing but to emphasize its fragility, and its capacity for suffering. The move away from what Scott Brown saw as an out-of-date utopian modernism toward her own “field work”-based realism is thus also a move from a discourse about universal needs to one about specific diagnoses and remedies. For Scott Brown, the photograph, in documenting and presenting everyday reality in all its banality, pain or beauty, becomes a well-calibrated tool of diagnosis, made necessary and worthwhile by the way in which the information it contains is later deployed for the purpose of remedy. The architect-planner-designer makes her return to the ordinary world in order to save it, to do all she can to help struggling places in a hundred small ways and a few judiciously chosen big ones, keeping in mind the ethical obligation of the medical professional: Do no harm.

The compassionate position implied by a notion of design as treatment has great appeal, and numerous proponents. It has arguably become far more entrenched in architecture and planning culture than have the formal techniques characteristic of Venturi Scott Brown’s architecture. But it is hardly free of difficulty or complexity. A central tension persists, emerging most fully in those photographs collected here where the project of an ethical mode of design seems inadequate against the stark inequities on display. Scott Brown traveled much of the world, frequently snapping photographs from cars and planes, and one cannot help but notice that many of her subjects were not afforded even a fraction of that freedom of movement.¹⁵ Further, when one looks at portraits of struggling shopkeepers on South Street or children in North Philadelphia, one begins to become aware of the double-edged nature of compassion as an operative force. Scott Brown’s photographs bring these people to our attention, reminding us of the reality of their lives, and the photographs justify themselves in the pleas they make on behalf of these people’s interests. But in establishing these people as vulnerable, in need of help from the well-equipped designer, the photographs perhaps necessarily also risk stripping away their agency—and turning their plight into a source of validation for architects on shaky ground in a post-avant-garde moment. At work is both a “politics of solidarity” and a “politics of inequality,” to adopt the terms used in a related context by the anthropologist Didier Fassin. The tension between these two poles makes these photographs at once captivating and complex.¹⁶