Do architects really wear black? This was one of the questions that Dr Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, Dr Kate Sweetapple and myself set out to answer with our visual research project Documentation: The Visual Sociology of Architects. Partly we were working in response to the 2009 exhibition Portraits and Architecture at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, which raised many questions about the construction and maintenance of the creative persona and the ‘look’ of the architect. We were also interested in the professional status of women in Australian architecture – the fact that, though numerous and highly successful, women architects tend to be less ‘visible’ in the public domain than their male counterparts. And we were interested in how the architectural persona is reflected in narrative film – that parade of glamorous, sensitive and well-dressed (usually male) romantic leads who never seem to do any actual work. The various myths and stereotypes that surround the persona of the architect are often comical. They are also almost always exclusionary. But they are valid objects of cultural analysis in themselves, as the scholarly fields of sociology and cultural studies clearly show. Even as architectural theorists might work to deconstruct the pervasive myths of architectural authorship, the world at large is loath to let them go. It is clear that representations of architects in popular culture provide a barometer of what the world wants to believe about architects and architecture, regardless of the actualities of the discipline and the profession.

The growing field of visual studies has often been criticised for its apparent superficiality. But architects, of all people, should understand the value and meaning of the façade and, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” Even in the early stages of analysing the image archive collected through the Documentation project, it is clear that the vast majority of people photographed were not wearing black, just as the group was strikingly diverse in age, ethnicity, gender and fashion expression.

In this presentation I will draw upon the Documentation project, as well as my earlier work on the representation of architectural authorship in documentary film, to examine the image construction of the creative professional, as amplified through popular culture.

DR NAOMI STEAD is a Research Fellow in the ATCH (Architecture | Theory | Criticism | History) Research Group in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland. Her scholarly work has been published in anthologies such as Critical Architecture (Jane Rendell et al. eds, Routledge, London, 2007), Architecture and Authorship (Katja Grillner et al. eds, Black Dog, London, 2007) and Architecture, Disciplinarity and Art (Andrew Leach and John Macarthur eds, A & S Books, Ghent, 200