World Photography Day
GAD always aspires to provide our community with all the tools and knowledge to help imagine, design, and build better environments. To inspire and highlight aspects of architecture that go beyond the built project, we are featuring a series of photographs to commemorate World Photography Day celebrated on August 19th every year. We showcase the work of renowned architecture photographers and share some thoughts that allow us insight into the world of architecture and photography. We will be sharing with you our opinions along with photographs of their work.
Some of the most relevant names GAD took as an example to share with you in architectural photography are Ezra Stoller, Paul Warchol, and Iwan Baan. When facing modernist dictations, its dominating character, and lifeless images, New York-based architectural photographer Ezra Stoller flashes to mind. Although Stoller’s images express the three-dimensional experience of architecture through a two-dimensional medium, he created greyish, people-less, and material images mostly recognized for indelibly communicating the strengths of post-war architecture. Since GAD’s notion of architecture and its representation in photography is believed to be alive, colorful, and lively, the way Stoller depicts the architecture in which light, space, and color do not appreciate the strengths of architectural formations of beautifully structured buildings. And we believe this reduces the essence of space in a broader sense. Compared to Stoller, on the other hand, the photographers Paul Warchol, and Iwan Baan have photographed the world of architecture with more careful attention to vantage point and lighting conditions as well as line, color, form, and texture. GAD believes architectural photography breaks paradigms and immortalizes the works with the capability of picture capturing the essence, emotion, and mood of a moment in time.
Although all three photographers narrate the life and interactions that occur within architecture, the way Paul Warchol, and Iwan Baan document the world of architecture and the social context surrounds us reveals more meaning with more liveable environments, available objects, and materials in the photographs. While Warchol and Baan mirror the questions and perspectives of everyday life with varying colors, textures, and scales, Stoller depicted buildings as isolated and static with a people-less environment, in a sense of architectural fetishism of the architectural object vs social life. Our modern image-obsessed culture has trapped us in consuming a large quantity of architecture through photographs, as opposed to physical, spatial experiences. We believe that architectural photography is very important since it allows people to acquire a visual understanding of buildings that they may never have a chance to visit in their lifetime. Successful architectural photography creates a valuable resource that enables us to expand our architectural vocabulary, not presenting just static, abstract, isolated imagery but emphasizing the life in it.
