Techniques of Architectural Photography – Final Submission
Category: ARCH312
Techniques of Architectural Photography – project renders
Nowadays, we are stuck at home because of the Coronavirus. Therefore, we are not able to take new photographs by using the techniques that we have discussed in the class. So, we were asked to take renders from our studio projects by applying these techniques and considering framing. The picture below is only a quick draft to explore what kind of pictures I can make.
Architectural Photographer
For the architectural photography course we were assigned to analyse the work of an architectural photographer to contextualize, analyse formal qualities and interpret the ideas and meanings. I have studied on the works of Filip Dujardin.
Dujardin started his career as an art and architecture photographer and moved on to creating his own imaginary architecture by digital collage technique. More recently, he has developed installations that explore the boundaries between architecture and sculpture. On top of that, Dujardin creates a fascinating dialogue between 3D-installation and photography.
Besides his photography of documentation, he mostly in the side of translation of architectural knowledge which means interpretations of the photographer. He thinks that architectural photography gives the opportunity to interpret what is expected to be presented. Such as compression to show more or elimination to show less.
While analyzing his formal qualities such as arrangement within the frame, it is possible to see the aimed context: it adapts itself to the borders of the frame while creating tension. A common concern in his works is exploring new tensions by detecting new typologies in architecture and interpreting them. Also, he mostly uses frontal expressions of the objects to clearly capture and integrate the horizontal and vertical elements within the frame while experiencing them on different scales.
The main keys in his works are typological approach, tradition, compressing, fragments of reality, surrealism, manipulation, and fictions. He focuses on the ordinary types of objects such as columns, walls, chimneys, and observes how interpretations and manipulations can expand their genres. These observations have encouraged him to make a series of images that deal with notions of the architecture of re-realized reality, as a kind of fabricated reality. His fictional buildings evolved out of his frustration with not always having a dynamic-enough subject to make an interesting image. Since then, he is weaving the surreal into the urban language as Belgian cultural heritage, referencing surrealist artists such as René Magritte and Raoul Servais.
Fictions present impossible architecture in conceptual subjectivity created with digital collage techniques from photographs of existing buildings in and around Ghent. So this work deals with ways in which fragments of reality can be recorded and re-imagined in a series of whole as collages. Dujardin has created buildings that impossible to construct; sculptural formations which are occurred after criticizing and manipulating the ordinary typologies & traditions of the architecture. At his series of ‘Fiction’, there is a confusion that at first glance they seem ordinary but they reveal their absurdity upon closer inspection. Their attractiveness is that they look like impossible architecture but still in the range of plausibility. He called them ‘ancient monuments from the future’ because of the tension that they are high-tech but exteriors were added in low tech skin with industrial materials like concrete or brick. With his approach, he distances himself from today’s conventional methods of depicting real architecture like renderings. Dujardin appreciates the complete freedom and spontaneity he has during building in a virtual model.
In conclusion, it is possible to say that his works are a kind of evocative reconceptualization, rethinking, and re-fragmentation of the architecture that exists as a kind of image system. Compressions of the cultures, regions, traditions, history, memorials, and cityscapes.
Techniques of Architectural Photography 04
This week, my theme was “what’s left behind” which focuses on the emotions of the photos rather than the arrangement qualities. These pictures show the silent moments after a crowd of people have left the space. A train leaves from the station, all tourists leave the beach, people who finished the food leaves the restaurant, a child leaves a toy, crowd leaves the place after the event finishes and life leaves the memories behind.
Techniques of Architectural Photography 03
This week, my theme was “timing in cityscape”. Durations of morning, afternoon, and night provides different quality of colors, shadows, sharpness / smoothness and reflections. Beside that, the strength of the common figures of the cities as poles (traffic light pole, electrical pole, lightning pole, direction sign pole) creates different perception at different times. Also, I have tried to arrange the photos in a continuity of the figures.
Techniques of Architectural Photography 02
This week, my theme was “Lines within sky, sky within lines”. At some photographs, lines are arranged accordingly to the frame while randomness dominate the other pictures. Working in black and white, strengthens the contrast issue and make it possible to have silhouette shadows.
Techniques of Architectural Photography 01
Florence 
Milan 
Patras 
Rome 
Venice
I am taking the ARCH312 course, Techniques of Architectural Photography. Every week we have been uploading photographs of our own or other photographers. The issue is defining a theme and exploring it.
In the first week I focused on one perspective photographs that I have taken previously in Italy. In common, each picture is framed by the buildings at two sides which strengthens the perspective idea. The motion of the figures at the middle (people, cars, crane, sheets) can be sensed and make the photographs unique. This moment can not be captured as the same.
more and more Architect 