Architectural photographs are communication tools
What makes a photographer an architectural photographer? How many people are involved on an architectural photograph?
Architectural photography is a truly collaborative effort of communication that requires the committed implication of all the parties involved to succeed.
It is ultimately always the photographer the one who presses the camera shutter that actually takes the photograph from a particular point of view and on a specific moment to capture the essence of an architectural project and to communicate it in images.
To reach that decisive and unique instant that concentrates the enormous responsibility to portray on a two-dimensional image all the immense work, experience and expectations of all the professionals who have designed and built the architecture project, nothing is more necessary than knowing for sure that the photographer absolutely understands the project because only then he will be able to read it and to create photographs that will nothing but fascinate those who observe them.
Nothing happens and everything is lost if an architect and a photographer are not really able to understand themselves at the time of communicating a project because then no photograph will successfully represent it for making that the first inviting experience that many people will have of the architectural project will be tempting and seductive.
BP Gas Station | Elval Colour | Madrid
BP Gas Station | Elval Colour | Madrid
BP Gas Station | Elval Colour | Madrid
Remember that there are always two people dialoguing on a photograph, a photographer and an observer. On an architectural photograph a third person joins the conversation, the architect.
All of these people lively talk to each other but it is only the observer the one who determines the true effective ability of the architectural photograph to attract and awaken in him the necessity to learn more about the project: if the photographer and the architect can not come to understand between themselves, then nothing that they could do will make the observer to be interested in any of their proposals.
We are not dealing with merely documenting a project in images, it is a matter of interpreting it so that the effort of creating a worthwhile and really effective communication of the architecture project in enticing photographs works.
Architectural photographs can only reach the real sense that its creators intend if all the parties involved in the process of communication -the architect, the photographer and the observer- can all understand them. If any of these three parts can’t properly read and understand the content that it is hidden behind the graphic appeal of an image, then photographs get completely useless.
It is this creative ability to communicate ideas through compelling images what makes the difference between photographers and people who only owns a camera.