CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/25/2025

The incisive photography of Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown is best known for changing the contemporary understanding of and approach to architecture—not only as author of the seminal 1972 postmodern treatise Learning from Las Vegas, which she penned together with her partner and fellow architect Robert Venturi, but for her fearless advocacy for representation of women in the field from the 1970s onward. But before, during and as a fundamental component of her many years in architecture and planning, she has also made photographs. Now, a careful selection of these, from the 1950s to the 1970s, have been collected in the beautifully produced, 434-page new release, Encounters: Denise Scott Brown Photographs, edited by Izzy Kornblatt in collaboration with Scott Brown and published by Lars Müller. Scott Brown did much more than simply document shifts in history, Kornblatt writes. “Through her photography—in addition, of course, to her research, writing and design work—she played a central role in effecting those shifts, reframing the ways in which designers saw themselves and their role in shaping an agonized world.”