Architecture Photography
I am an international architectural photographer. I photograph for some of the world’s finest architects and interior designers, as well as for leading national and international magazines, book publishers and newspapers.
Previously I also studied architecture and worked in architectural practices including Foster and Partners and the then Richard Rogers Partnership. I have found that this sequence has a long history.
When for instance in 1896 the ‘National Art Training School’ was granted the title ‘Royal College of Art’ all students were first required to study architecture before moving onto other disciplines. Architecture was then considered the ‘Mother of the Arts’.
By accident rather than design I have found it has served the same function for me. I’d studied architecture before I’d ever owned a camera and it’s lessons remain central to my practice as an architecture photographer.
Architecture was photography’s first subject matter making architectural photography the world’s oldest photographic discipline. Indeed eighty percent of the collection of The Photography Centre at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum are examples of architecture photography.
The first photographers chose architecture because it was the only subject-matter that primitive chemicals necessitating very long exposures could capture. Other obvious subjects, like people, moved. Indeed the first permanent photograph, Nicephone Niepce’s ‘View from the Study Window’ of 1827, was an architectural image taken in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France. Interestingly because the chemicals necessitated an exposure of over 8 hours facades facing both east and west can be seen lit by the sun.
Niepce’s partner and the man credited with first popularising photography, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, had himself trained as an architect. He invented the ‘Daguerreotype’ (the first widely adopted technique to fix an image) in order that it might document: “every man’s castle and country estate”.
The characteristic of the daguerreotype that limited it’s historical sway, however, was that it created only single artworks which could not be reproduced and which were mirrored images. Henry Fox-Talbot’s innovation - the ‘Calotype’ (the first negative) instead allowed the subsequent creation of any number of reproductions from the original.
The Daguerreotype did have its adherents however. John Ruskin considered it “a most blessed invention” and acquired his own camera which he had operated by his valet John Hobbs. He loved its indiscriminate absorption of detail: “every chip of stone and stain is there” he wrote excitedly.
But the Calotype revolutionised photography taking it from the process of making individual works of art to a revolutionary process of image making which was quickly recognised during the
the 1850s when, according to Building News, photography of buildings “advanced from recreation to trade.” A huge boost was given by London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 in which over seven hundred photographs of architecture were displayed from six countries around the world.
By the 1860s there were enough enthusiasts that architecture photography became established as a profession arguably to the lasting detriment of the standing of the genre. For whereas originally the leading architecture photographers were simply the leading photographers of the day, architectural photographers became increasingly viewed as commercial photographers who mechanically documented a scene as distinct from art photographers who fashioned art from a scene. This supposed split - between photography as art and photography as information - was established: between those who sought accurate documentation of buildings for clients such as architects and those who sought to use them to explore abstract or metaphysical themes, such as the ravages of time.
Looking back what perhaps better describes this split between two different aims of architectural photography would be to chart their products along two separate spectra. There is the spectrum of sentiment with those who embraced an emotive and picturesque view of Architecture Photography on one side and those whose sought in their work to mirror the cold detachment of science on the other. And there is also the spectrum of artistic value with work commonly regarded as workmanlike and uninspired at one end and some of great artistic value at the other.
What we think of as famous architectural photographers, just like famous art photographers can be pinned across the intersection of these axes depending upon personal opinion. Alfred Stieglitz’s hand-held photo of ‘The Flatiron’ (1903), for example, could firmly be viewed as being on the picturesque wing, Hilla and Bernd Becher’s famous series of photographs of industrial typologies (first published in 1970 as ‘Anonyme Skulturen: Eine Typologie Technischer Bauten’) being firmly on the scientific. However I might argue that both are examples of architectural photography of artistic value however disparate their author’s intentions.
This contrast between the picturesque mode and the more self-consciously scientific mode can be seen in the work of architectural photographers throughout the 19th century. Francis Bedford, the son of a Classical Revival Architect sought much more self-consciously picturesque subjects like half-timbered houses, attractive villages and parish churches. In doing so he both prefigured and directly encouraged the revival after classicism of vernacular architecture pioneered by architects such Davey, Richard Normans Shaw and George Bodely that became the Arts and Crafts movement.
In the twentieth century architectural photography followed architecture in becoming inflected with the aspirations and optimism of the Modern Movement. Le Corbusier’s famous dictum from ‘Towards a New Architecture’ defined architecture as, “the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light” and the massive increase in the use of glass to delineate architectural masses gave architectural photographers huge scope for creativity increasing light levels just as black and white and colour films became much faster.
However the difficulties inherent in the craft persisted and indeed persist to this day.
The first central challenge is that of parallax which requires cameras to be pointed perpendicular to the ground otherwise the photograph has the ‘converging verticals’ reminiscent of the ‘train tracks effect’ which an iphone camera sees but our eyes do not. Interestingly optically our eyes do ‘see’ parallax and it is only in our brains that the effect is corrected. The first photographers who had bellows connecting the lens board from the film board (much like a modern-day monorail camera) had the means of correcting this effect simply by shifting the plane of the lens.
Seemingly today this same issue can be fixed by DSLR (digital single-lens-reflex) cameras with tilt-shift lenses but using this equipment opens up a much more profound set of issues which didn’t affect the large-format photographers of the past.
These are the challenges of spatial accuracy ie. the difficulty of creating a two-dimensional image that doesn’t just look right but crucially ‘feels’ right as well.
Architectural photography is inherently ambitious because it’s trying to do something the human eye can’t. It’s trying to describe a field of view in perfect detail and sharpness so wide that we witness it in person only in our peripheral vision. As a consequence all wide-angle lenses have a degree of distortion because they are doing something more natural to an antelope’s eye than a human eye.
Thirty-five millimetre Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) lenses, like those made by Canon, Nikon and Sony, have a lot more inherent distortion than the lenses of technical cameras. Partly this is simply a consequence of the degree of miniaturisation of capture ie. how much smaller the sensor is than the subject of the photo. This often results in objects within interior photographs looking slightly wrong, for example, round tables that do not look round but elliptical. But even if the viewer can’t immediately define what’s wrong they can sense it, something in the photograph doesn’t feel quite right.
Even once the photographer has shifted the plane of the camera separately from that of the digital sensor it creates other technical challenges which result from the difficulty of this task including:
‘Chromatic Aberration’ : where unwanted lines of solid colour (usually green or magenta) appear along the perimeter of objects in the image. DSLR cameras such as those made by Sony, Canon and Nikon are susceptible to this effect not because of their sensors but because of the refraction that occurs in the complex layers of glass used in the manufacture of their lenses.
‘Scheimpflug’ : where shifting the plane between the lens and the digital back takes the focal plane of the lens away from the plane of the digital sensor resulting in pulling some areas out of focus. This can be eradicated by tilting as well as shifting the lens or the camera.
Some cameras tackle these images more easily than others.Technical cameras of the kind made by Arca-Swiss, Alpha and Linhoff are the true inheritors of the tradition of larger-format photography. Also the medium-format digital sensor that these cameras employs can overcome many of the challenges of the 35mm sensor not because of a largely meaningless megapixel count but because their sensors are physically bigger - at least two and a half times so, therefore the degree of miniaturisation required is that much less.