Swiss architecture photographer Heinrich Helfenstein (1946 – 2020) saw photography as a tool for research and design and more than just a means of documenting. As early as the 1970s he was already working as a translator and communicator of complex themes such as texts about semiotics by Roland Barthes. In collaboration with architect and university professor Aldo Rossi he undertook photography excursions that led him through urban landscapes and the industrial and agricultural periphery in Switzerland and abroad. From the 1980s as a teacher and illustrator of theoretical reflections he took part in the discourse about Switzerland’s growing peripheries. His Mittelland series from 1990 shows in exemplary fashion how images can be read as “texts”. They not only depict but also explore new layers of perception and meaning. One of his last series, made in 2013, focused on single-family housing estates; a spatial planning discourse that has continued to the present day.