I have always been interested in photography as an art form. Artistic painting, the progenitor of photography, is a reflection of the artist's imagination, also tells us a story, but in a different way, because it takes a long time to create it. Even as a child, looking at the world-famous iconic objects of photographic art, I was excited by the realization of how beautiful this moment is, when the captured image tells us a whole story, how much chance and will of chance is in it, and how much professionalism of the photographer.
Starting to engage in architectural visualization, my passion for photography reached a new level, because architectural photography is a fundamental basis for creating any architectural visualization. I would say that architectural visualization is a kind of child of two parents - photography and paintings, given to us in our digital age by the development of technology.
Credit: Architizer
Photography has its origins in the first experiments carried out by the Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1793, who was interested in Leonardo da Vinci's camera obscura techniques, and his successful trial in 1826. Since then, photography has become a way of capturing the moments and places experienced around the world. In the development of photographic art, architecture from the first days occupied one of the leading roles, acting as an object that reflects the cultural characteristics of the era of social development. J. M. Daguerre and William Talbot can be considered the pioneers of this direction of photography, who in 1839 photographed buildings as motionless inanimate objects with maximum exposure. And the first specialized architectural photographer is considered to be Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, who began photographing from the beginning of 1841 significant places around the world, from Notre-Dame in Paris, to the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs and the Parthenon in Greece. Two approaches to architecture photography emerged: façade, where the structure was photographed from the front, showing a kind of two-dimensional view of the building, and perspective, where the building was photographed from an angle, adding a third dimension, as well as the space surrounding the building.
Credit: Architectural Digest India
Since then, architectural photography has evolved, finding perhaps its most striking application with the development of modern architecture in the early 20th century. The architectural practice of the time was closely linked to building a discourse around a project, and it was common for an architect to associate working closely with a photographer to promote his project. This coincided with the development of magazines, in particular specialized architecture publications, promoting architecture to a wider range of audiences.
Credit: Architectural Digest
The architects of that time positioned their work as a kind of manifesto, so photographs of the building were an integral part of creating a discussion around it. Notable examples of such cooperation between an architect and a photographer include the architects Le Corbusier and Lucien Hervé, Walter Gropius and the photographer T. Lux Feininger during the Bauhaus era, Frank Lloyd Wright and the photographers Henry Fuhrmann and Pedro E. Guerrero, as well as Richard Neutra and Julius Schulmann.
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The latter embodied one of the most famous examples of the promotion of the project, called Case Study Houses, sponsored by Art and Architecture magazine is a landmark in American architectural history, embodied in 1945-1966. These houses were designed to overcome the post-war housing crisis through rapid construction and inexpensive materials, while still applying the principles of modern design and cutting-edge modern technology of the time. Case Study houses were shaped with a focus on materials and structural design.
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Speaking of architectural photography, one cannot fail to mention the name of Ezra Stoller, whose photographs embodied the architectural principles of that time: elegance, simplicity, purity. His work was so widely recognized that his name, like Google and the derived verb “google”, created the verb “Stollerized”, denoting a building photographed by him, and therefore of high quality. He photographed for most of the prominent architects of the era, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Erwin Louis Hahn and Philip Johnson.
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Today, architectural photography also has its prominent representatives in architectural photography, such as, whose work we often use to search for references when creating architectural visualizations. His work also tells the stories of our time - as an example, we can recall his photographs from the construction of the CCTV building in Beijing, designed by Rem Koolhaas. Baan photographs the impact of the building on its surroundings, highlighting the contrast between the scale and technology of the project and the surrounding low-rise buildings. Architectural photography, as an art form, captures an era and, in addition to expressing the architectural features of the time, reflects the social structure of society, being a documentary reflection of history.
Credit: The New York Times
Architectural visualization, which came to the digital era, has become a natural continuation of the symbiosis of painting and photography. It embodies the artistic search and the author's style, characteristic of them. The visualization was a fresh breath of the duo's proven senses. When creating architectural visualization, the artist uses skills from fine arts, such as composition, the basics of color, balance of light and shadows, but also in his arsenal there are necessarily tools inherent in architectural photographers - building a frame and creating a story around his image. Architectural visualization is certainly not intended to replace photography, despite the constant improvement of technology, when the best examples of modern visualization are already difficult to distinguish from photography, in my opinion both art forms will remain self-sufficient in their development. Visualization is intended to rather expand the scope of the possible, because in most cases it reflects an architecture that has not yet been built, being a kind of documentary of an uncreated world that opens up a large field for fantasy and discourse construction. Today we have an amazing opportunity to be part of a new heritage and contribute to a new history.