Filip Martens in his The Aesthetics of Space: Modern Architecture and Photography in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 69 no.1 (a free sample copy) makes an interesting observation about architectural photography.

He says that the emergence of modern architecture coincided with the popularization of photography and that:

Given the modernists’ fascination with the metropolis, the bustle of crowded streets and busy traffic, and given the typically modernist visions of the orchestration of the crowds, it is striking to see how desolate their interior spaces are when photographed. Schools, cinemas, houses, and the like are almost always shown as deserted, devoid of people, and often even completely cleared out, with no furniture or other signs of human occupation. This characterizes a great deal of architectural photography from its origin to the present day.

what is the purpose of the ‘emptiness’ that so strongly characterizes architectural photography? Is it that (a) the emptiness of these depicted spaces merely serves the purpose of rendering a neutral photographical representation? Or is it that (b) this emptiness fulfills a specific role in that it influences—or has come to influence—our appreciation of the spatiality of architecture?

It suggests that photography developed a manner of portraying architecture that has come to determine the way we look at architectural space. Martens says:

a photograph of an object is fundamentally different from a direct perceptual experience of the same object. A photograph leaves out the spatial horizon of possible views on the object's surroundings as well as the temporal horizon of previous and subsequent experiences of the perceiver. By freezing a moment and framing a perspective, photography isolates objects, events, and situations from their original spatiotemporal context. Thus, by capturing something in a frame, a photograph offers an uncommon presentation of common things. Art photography can further exploit this and make one look differently at familiar things.

a tendency to remove inhabitants along with any object referring to their occupations from the image it presents. However, with the removal of functional references, the support for a spontaneous understanding of the spatial organization also disappears. When functionality and its significance vanish, so too does the purposive nexus that grounds our spontaneous spatial interpretations.As significance recedes, abstract spatial compositions come to the fore. Hence, it is plausible that the initial “idea” of architectural space has been further elaborated through the way in which interior spaces have typically been depicted in photographs. As they are usually seen in pictures, architectural interiors exert a certain attraction on us because they no longer appear as part of a functional, purposeful whole.