To live is to leave traces. The architectural photographer, artist, writer, and political activist Elizabeth Felicella embodied this precept in the most evanescent of ways. Felicella died on December 22, 2024, after a two-year battle with leukemia. She would not have liked the word battle. For her, life, even when most elemental, was the art of leaving traces, in the sense given by the precept. A true artist-intellectual, Felicella would have recognized its author as Walter Benjamin, philosopher of lifes tragic drama. She might even have found his words too obvious here. But anyone who knew Elizabeth or worked with herand there are manywould recognize their special aptness in summarizing her spirit.Reading Room: A Catalog of New York Citys Branch Libraries, 2008-2013. Excerpt. (Elizabeth Felicella)What Felicella left for us were mostly photographs, of architecture, landscape, and the societies that these arts have helped to build, and to which they belong. An acutely conceptual photographer, New York was her muse. In 2016, the Center for Architecture exhibited Reading Room: A Catalog of New York Citys Branch Libraries, a selection from over 2,000 photographs taken with a large-format camera of the citys 210 branch libraries, inside and out, arranged serially and straightforwardly in a grid.In effect, Felicellas entire body of work can be seen through this grid. Architecture was for her a public art, in which sense there were no more noble buildings than the citys humble, ubiquitous branch libraries. As documented by her keen, careful eye, these modest monuments to learning and living stand in stark defiance of the picture-postcard views of skylines and skyscrapers with which the city is conventionally portrayed. Over the several decades of her professional career, Felicella photographed hundreds of works of architecture and landscape architecture by and with some of todays most distinguished practitioners. It is tempting to think retrospectively that she may have also been inviting them and us to add their work, whatever form it took, to the visual list of mostly anonymous public monuments she would eventually compile in Reading Room. But even the Center for Architectures generous walls could not have contained the resulting portrait of contemporary architecture and landscape design, matter-of-factly arranged.Photographs are themselves commemorative. They detach from their objects and live lives of their own. In print, online, or on gallery walls, this is mostly how architecture and design leave their own traces and are remembered. Frequently, Felicellas photographs are populated by what our professional language awkwardly calls users, to the point sometimes that figure and ground trade places, and those who give life to buildings and landscapes become objects of our attention in themselves. So too with natures traces. Mist, snow, morning dew: More than just portraying buildings and landscapes in use and over time, Felicellas photographs capture tiny morsels of time, moments that, like the building arts themselves, defy times passage.Architecture Research Office, Rothko Chapel Renewed, Houston, Texas, 2020. (Elizabeth Felicella)Felicella, a graduate of Bard College, studied fine art as a Fulbright Scholar at the Hochschule der Knste (HdK, now the Universitt der Knste) in Berlin, after a period of graduate study in German literature at Columbia University. Staying on at HdK to teach, she became immersed in the architectural debates coursing through the newly reunited city. Upon returning, Felicella, who also served during this period as managing editor at Zone Books, turned toward decisively architectural photography as an artistic practice and a professional career. Uniformly, Felicellas most frequent collaboratorsour language calls them clientsspeak of her and her photographs as if they were one. They also speak of seeing their own work differently through her eyes. The art of photographing buildings and landscapes in ephemeral use is also one of recognition. It is rigorously time consuming. The best of relationships between the architect-designer and photographer is therefore a sustained experience, a slow, intermittent performance over days, sometimes weeks, even seasons, or years. Felicellas photographs recognize life and work as a series of social relationships. Even when her object is made to pose most severely and with brightest polish, we glimpse a wry smile, a wink of acknowledgement that after all, we are in this together.During the COVID-19 interregnum, Felicella documented the subtle adjustments made to the Rothko Chapel in Houston by her frequent collaborators, Architecture Research Office (ARO), for whom she photographed numerous other works. The design problem was the lighting, specifically the skylight; ARO had worked with the lighting designer George Sexton Associates to soften the daylight and illuminate the paintings in the most invisibly delicate of ways. Felicellas photographs respect and record the harsh geometry of both space and skylight, while deferring to the inherent resistance of Rothkos paintings to reproduction. In the most poignant of these, two visitors sit on a bench in a manner that mirrors the chapels symmetries. When we note photographs date as the spring of 2021, the measured gap that separates the two figures on the axis established by Felicellas lens becomes, uncannily, the gap of social distance to which an entire society had become accustomed in the year immediately prior.Michael Van Valkenberg Associates, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn, New York, 2021. (Elizabeth Felicella)That same year, Brooklyn Bridge Park, designed by Michael Van Valkenberg Associates with numerous others, was completed after over 20 years of planning, design, and construction. Felicellas photographs record the parks development through its entire course. In them, the city breathes. Children play, couples stroll, crowds mill about, pets pitter-patter. Most of all, bridge and skyline stoop down to greet rocks and grass and foliage. Their movements are registered unsentimentally, and again the citys inhabitants are far from mere scale figures. Instead, the ensemblepark, buildings, bridge, peoplebecomes an act of public appearance, a demonstration of what it means to navigate a city as its made, and to participate in its making. The park appears in this light also in Directions, a collaborative work with Robert Sullivan in Places Journal (2018). Sullivans text asks what it means to ask directions in the parks vicinity. Felicellas photographs juxtapose park with city in a manner that shows indirectly, and mainly now from the side of the city, the directions from which that question is asked.Raymond Farm, New Hope, Pennsylvania. (Elizabeth Felicella)Another Felicella adventure, conducted under pandemic restrictions, was a five-day photoshoot that turned into a long-term residency at Raymond Farm near New Hope, Pennsylvania, where the midcentury architect-designers Antonin and Nomi Raymond relocated after two decades in Japan. Working with a team of scholars and preservationists on a book and exhibition project that would become Uncrating the Japanese House (2022), she photographed Shfs, the archetypal Japanese house designed by Yoshimura Junz for exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in 1954 and then crated and reassembled in West Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia. Antonin Raymond had been Junzs mentor in Japan; the Raymonds, along with their New Hope neighbor George Nakashima, remained part of a circle linking modern architecture to Japanese tradition. Welcomed by the Raymonds granddaughter Charlotte, Felicella stayed for several months in the Quaker farmhouse the couple had transformed into a studio-residence, photographing its many personalities, alongside those of Nakashimas furniture studio nearby, still operated by his family. Together, what this ensemble would enact for us would be a pivot from the past to the present, a performance in which the most compelling dramatic tension centers on us, here in the present, rather than on a distant and ultimately unknowable plot. With these words, Felicella could have been describing her lifes work. In actuality they describe an imaginary projection of her architectural photographs, gathered on the stage of the New Century Club (1893), designed by the Philadelphia architect Minerva Parker Nichols. The photographs were among the 247 Felicella made as a submission documenting Nicholss work to the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), published in an edited volume accompanied by an exhibitionincluding a selection of Felicellas photographsat the University of Pennsylvania in 2023.Idlewild: An Atlas of the Periphery of Kennedy International Airport. Excerpt, Broad Channel. (Elizabeth Felicella)There is a through line here. HABS had its origins in the New Deal, under the auspices of which New Yorks branch libraries hosted numerous civic programs and works of public art, and the Brooklyn Public Library, where Felicella also exhibited Reading Room and was the Librarys first Artist in Residence, was renovated and extended. Felicella was fiercely committed to progressive politics; she regularly volunteered on political campaigns in her Morningside Heights neighborhood and traveled to Albany to lobby state lawmakers with strategic intent. More epically, a distinct combination of historical optimism and irony, along with family ties to the world of airline workers, found her for years roaming the edges of Idlewild, now JFK, photographing the environs of this gigantic piece of public infrastructure that was built when New Yorks New Deal airport, LaGuardia, overflowed. She titled the project Idlewild: An Atlas of the Periphery of Kennedy International Airport.Felicellas last work, left incomplete with her passing, was Picturing Investment: WPA Infrastructure in New York, a photography and writing collaboration with her domestic partner, George Stolz. With support from the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA), Felicella had set out to produce a photographic survey of selected pieces of infrastructure built under the New Deals Works Projects Administration in the state. The few photographs she was able to make, very shortly before her diagnosis, are haunting not only for their circumstances, but also for their stillness, the temporary equilibrium between city and nature that they strike. In one, an enormous steel-and-concrete pylon descends from the Henry Hudson Bridge, to nestle among an improbable forest of bare trees. As if reflecting on the interpenetrating layers of her work, Felicella seems to be asking whether our attention should be trained melancholically on the past or enigmatically on the present; on the machine in the garden or on the garden itself; on the history from which the bridge sprang or on that to which it now belongs. A visual historian of New York, the city we shared, Elizabeth Felicella knew too well that the point is to see what stands before us, here and now.Reinhold Martin is Professor of Architecture at Columbia University; Elizabeth Felicella was his distant cousin and close friend.