La restituzione prospettica da fotografia per la ricostruzione di edifici perduti. Via Libertà, Palermo, 1958-1971

Since its inception, photography has elected architecture and the city as one of its favourite subjects, along with portraiture. Professional photographers carry out extensive photo campaigns to illustrate the monumental beauty of cities. These photographic archives often constitute the only available documentation of buildings and urban contexts that have disappeared as a result of wartime events or urban transformation programmes. It is well known that SfM photogrammetric techniques allow the generation of spatial data (point clouds, meshes) from groups of appropriately acquired photographic images. The technique produces effective results when a large number of photographic images from multiple points of capture are available. Architectural photos kept in archives usually portray buildings from a few privileged points of view; at other times it is possible to find only one or two photographic images of a missing building, which therefore do not allow for SfM photogrammetric processing. In these cases, the three-dimensional reconstruction of the parts of a building depicted in the archive photographic images can be performed using perspective restitution.