Ten ideas on architectural photography and cinema I
Neither photographs nor movies can exist without the looks of the viewers for whom they were created. All communication is always based on an exchange of looks.
Although I have been an architectural photographer for many years and I studied both disciplines in college, I naturally assume that I carry today in my pocket a smartphone capable of taking photographs and recording video. I do know that the language of these two arts is different but I have also learned that I can use several resources from both to walk the streets with my camera and photograph an architecture project to communicate it. I present here ten ideas about architectural photography and cinema that I hope you will find useful:
1. When you watch a movie, everything that appears on the screen is carefully planned so that it conveys a specific sense to the story that the viewer is following. If any detail –however small– distracts you, that will not help the story to properly progress and so the viewer will not understand what is going on. In architectural photography the very same thing happens: everything that does not add a meaning to what you are explaining in the frame, in fact is subtracting it and you must to remove from it.
2. In the same way, everything that does not appear on the screen does not exist for the viewer. The limits of the frame that the photographer determines are the limits of the visible reality in which the image is created. When the film camera moves and the director changes the shot to accentuate an aspect of the story, the spectator learns new information about the plot and the characters that can be completed as the story progresses. Architectural photography cannot work with those understood to explain the project: the viewer only sees what the photographer intentionally shows him in the frame.
3. The dimensions of time are radically different in cinema and in architectural photography: cinema happens in time, it begins and ends. Photography is time, it never stops. Cinema develops an argument, linearly or not and that can be left open or closed but a story after all with a beginning and an end that the spectator expects and receives. A photograph lasts in time as much as many individual viewers contemplate it and give it a new interpretation, it never ends. That is the most difficult part of architectural photography, placing it out of time.
4. Space in a movie is one of the characters, maybe in a supporting role but never irrelevant. The cinema space frames the action, creates the background that develops the personality of the plot, moves with the other characters and talks with them, it is an active subject of the story. In architectural photography, a single leading actor who looks straight ahead at the viewer in an intense and sustained fixed shot recites a story. The space represented builds both the character and the narration: space is the star of architectural photography, nobody dares to shadows it.
5. Architectural photography is like a silent movie. You can’t use any support of sound or music to accentuate the narration, there is no pianist who emphasizes what the viewer contemplates in the frame. Nor are there dialogues because there are no characters –and even if there were–, there is only silence. All the dialogue in architectural photography is an interior one, of the photographer with the scene and of the viewer with the image. Maybe more like in a museum hall than in a movie theater.
So far here there are five ideas about the relationship between architectural photography and cinema to begin with, five more are on the way. Because whenever possible ... –and this works as much as for photography as for cinema– it is not bad to leave your audience waiting for more.
Coming soon to theater near to you !!
Read them here !!