12 Reasons Photography Is Vital in Architecture (Explained)
Photography itself is much like architecture – a practical art form that lends itself to the complexity of an entire field.
You are likely to understand the basics of photography and have likely practiced it. If you are like a lot of people, you practice it every day.
You may not do it professionally or have a studio with thousands of dollars’ worth of lenses, but you probably have a purpose for taking photos.
In the world of sharing media, architects and artists utilize photos to illustrate concepts to people in varying locations with a level of detail that even the most adept wordsmith could not come close to capturing.
Understandably, photography is an incredibly useful accomplice to the field of architecture for several reasons.
1. Photography Sells Real Estate
Real estate agents – the party who steps in after a building is constructed and when your job as an architect is (more or less) done.
For those browsing the housing market searching for a new place to establish their lives, knowing everything about a building is pertinent to informed decision-making.
Few have the time and money to drive around all day viewing and inspecting every home for sale. This hassle is where photography steps in, to make the housing market world easier to navigate for prospective buyers.
If done correctly, photographs can capture a home’s layout, design, and personality without the need to physically attend an open house.
This expedites the real estate industry enormously, and using photos to sell real estate is not restricted to homes, as marketers also use them to sell office and commercial spaces.
2. Benefits Economies by Promoting Tourism
Architecture conveys – perhaps more than any other form of art – the characteristics of different cultures.
Photographs encapsulate and make distinct the different styles found around the world, from the associations we immediately draw when we see the image of an Italian villa versus a Japanese temple.
When architecture draws the human spirit (as it is liable to do), it brings the human body and wallet to see these places in person.
3. Conveys Important Information from a Distance
Many people in the professional world who run franchises, flip houses, or sell office buildings are much too busy to set foot in every building that finds its way into a transaction.
Photographs enable real estate professionals to send essential details of buildings electronically so that business owners may get the information they need to make informed choices while not being pulled away from anything else they might be doing.
4. Enables Architectural Works of Art to be Displayed Indoors
While models are undoubtedly useful in conveying a design, sometimes the only way to represent the true elegance is through the building itself.
Since one cannot place a building in an art exhibit, architectural photographers step in to take inspired photographs to convey an architectural work of art as realistically as possible while highlighting the structure’s intrinsic qualities.
Sometimes, it takes two artists: the architect and the photographer, to represent a design effectively and to as large of an audience as possible.
5. Allows Beautiful Architecture to be Viewed by People Globally
While nearly everyone is familiar with the Empire State Building, the Eifel Tower, the Pyramid of Giza, and the Golden Gate bridge, far fewer have ever seen these works in person.
Travelling is expensive and lucrative for most people, but photography affords these structures global renown and appreciation.
To other architects, these photographs are a vast data-web of information from which they can draw inspiration for their works.
Thanks to photography, society can appreciate architecture even more.
6. It is Flattering to Architects
Imagine the pride of your own conception being so awe-inspiring that it inspires another artist to find even deeper value in your work by literally viewing it with a new lens.
That has got to feel pretty good.
7. It Includes Context
A photograph conveys not just a building’s design but also the surroundings in which it is understood and appreciated. A large portion of a building’s design that is not included in a blueprint, drawing, or model is usually the area around it.
Many excellent examples of architecture may have an initial appeal. Still, your jaw does not drop until you see a photograph of how the design impeccably flows with and complements the landscape and structures it surrounds.
8. Photography Can Isolate Details
You put a lot of effort into every component of your design; a blueprint simply cannot do justice to details. With photography, individual rooms, embellishments, and patterns can star as a subject in a print.
Amazingly, architectural design is not restricted to being a piece of art – it can be several.
9. Captures the Effects of Time
Buildings change. Some of these changes could be purposeful (renovations) or natural (think of the Statue of Liberty’s oxidization); time affects structures in ways that you, the architect, may not have anticipated.
Photographs span time and can encapsulate the evolution of the built environment in a way that no other medium can.
10. Draws People to Architecture
Thank architecture photographers for promoting the craft.
Through architectural photographs, structures can be presented in a way so that you view them as more than just some walls and a roof.
While not everyone may marvel at the buildings around them, photographs enable people to see that architecture is about more than facilities with specific functions – it is about the culture they are built around.
Great photographs demonstrate just how exciting and complicated architecture can be, and this is what brings new generations of artists and new ideas to the field.
11. Attracts Clients
There is no way to have the same impact with words that the effect a well-composed shot of your design will have.
Due to the easy distribution of photographs and an adept photographer’s ability to make a building seem even more magnificent than it appears in person, they are a great tool to help you market the fruits of your creativity to potentially high-paying clients.
12. When Tragedy Strikes
While you may expect the building you worked so passionately to design and create to last forever, this is unfortunately not always the reality.
Hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, and demolitions are a few bad tidings that could befall a beloved structure.
Fortunately, photography is a way that a building can be immortalized should the worst happen.
Architecture is an art form, and so is photography; these architectural photography tips help you put them in the best light.
