News Junkie

Photography special

While architects are quick to claim their work, those on the peripheries of the profession are generally a bit quieter. So it was nice to see the architectural photographers hogging the limelight over the weekend.

The I’m a Photographer not a Terrorist campaign group gathering and protest in London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday garnered a fair bit of press coverage with architectural photographers out in force and interviewed by almost every news outlet in the UK.

And in the US The New York Times profiled long-standing BD contributor Iwan Baan, placing him in the architectural photography canon alongside such greats as Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller and comparing his work to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Diane Arbus. Those four names might not obviously belong together, but Baan certainly deserves at least some of the praise being heaped on him.

“Just five years after he took up architectural photography, Mr. Baan is “remaking the genre,” said Charles Renfro, a partner in Diller Scofidio & Renfro, for whom he has photographed projects like the High Line and the renovated Lincoln Center. For decades magazine editors, developers and architects themselves favored a static style of photography that framed buildings as pristine objects. Mr. Baan’s work, while still showing architecture in flattering lights and from carefully chosen angles, does away with the old feeling of chilly perfection. In its place he offers untidiness, of the kind that comes from real people moving though buildings and real cities massing around them.” Read the full article here.

No related posts.