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.
To some extent I still think like an architect. For instance when you start to construct a technical drawing you need to understand the concept of a ‘setting out point’ from which the arrangement of objects derives. This is true of concrete columns but also things as seemingly easy to arrange as a line of chairs. I understand not only why what goes where by why it does so. I can not only recognise a ‘spandrel panel’ or ‘king-post truss’ but know what they do.
Architectural photography is the oldest photographic discipline. Indeed the first permanent photograph, Nicephone Niepce’s ‘View from the Study Window’ of 1827, was an architectural photograph.
When I photographed the V&A’s ‘Photography Centre’ for the museum I discovered that 80% of the museum’s collection were of architecture photography.
It is photography’s first subject matter and one which remains fraught with technical challenges.
The first problem is ‘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.
Seemingly this can be fixed by DSLR cameras with tilt-shift lenses but using this equipment opens up a much more profound set of issues.
These are problems of spatial accuracy ie. the creation of 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.
DSRL lenses like those made by Canon and Nikon have a lot more inherent distortion than the Schneider and Rodenstock technical lenses which I use to photograph buildings with my Arca-Swiss technical cameras.
This often results in objects within 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.
Part of the problem with the DSLR lens is that it’s trying to get all the information down to the 35mm sensor which owes its tiny scale to the legacy of its original function - testing 35mm movie film in the early 20th century.
Medium format digital backs are technically superior not because of a largely meaningless megapixel count but because their sensors are physically bigger - at least two and a half times so.
Today I work as an architectural photographer in London, the UK and all over the world for british and international clients. But unknown to me at the time I started learning my trade as a photographer when I first studied architecture.
I am also an interior architectural photographer so please take a look at my commercial interior photography