How Architecture Depends on Photography

Snippet of Ayer Itam to Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu Bypass Expressway photo progress documentary.

People tend to treat architecture and photography as separate worlds: one is about space, the other about light. Little did most know, they've actually been tangled together since photography was born, and the dependence runs both ways. In this article, let's access how architecture depends on photography.

When photography was first being worked out, its light-gathering capability was severely limited. You couldn't capture a moment; you had to wait for one. That ruled out most subjects. People move. Animals move. Even trees move, in their slow way. The only one subject that could and willing to sit still long enough was architecture. That's not a footnote in the story of photography. It's close to the center of it.

The oldest surviving photograph is a picture of buildings. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made it in 1826 at his estate in France, pointing his camera from an upstairs window at the rooftops and countryside beyond: View from the Window at Le Gras. Not a portrait. Not a scene with people in it. Buildings, because buildings could wait.

View from the Window at Le Gras, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, 1765-1833

The equipment tells the same story. Camera obscura is Latin for "dark chamber," and that was literal: the earliest ones were rooms with a small hole in the wall, projecting the outside world onto the opposite wall. By Niépce's time the room had shrunk to a box, which he set in his window; the name is a fossil of the room it used to be. What took so long wasn't the equipment. It was the exposure — traditionally cited as eight hours, though a researcher who recreated the process from Niépce's notes argues it ran to several days. Either way, you're not waiting for people.

Boulevard du Temple, Louis Daguerre (1787 - 1851)

Daguerre's famous 1838 view of a Paris boulevard shows what happened to everything that moved. The exposure ran ten or twelve minutes, so the traffic that should have filled the street vanished entirely; only a bootblack and his customer, standing still long enough, appear in the frame. It's often cited as the first photograph to show a person, and the person only got in by holding still like a building. Early portrait sitters needed posing tables and head rests to survive the exposure. Buildings needed none of that.

The dependence runs the other way, too. Buildings are large, slow, and immobile. You can't put a cathedral in a drawer or pass it around a table, and most of the world's important structures are inconveniently far from most of the world's people. Photographs are the surrogate: an easily shareable stand-in that lets you "visit" a building you will never stand in front of. For most of history, if you didn't live near a building, you simply didn't know anything about it. Now you've seen its picture before you've seen anything else about it let alone go near it.

But a photograph is not a truthful one-to-one copy of a building, whatever the word "record" implies. It's a frame, a position, a moment of light, a lens choice. That gives the photographer enormous agency over how the world experiences a structure. Two photographers can shoot the same building and produce two different buildings. As someone who photographs buildings and spaces for a living, I'm aware that my choices, where I stand and what I leave out, are the building for most people who will ever see it. That's a responsibility worth taking seriously.

A calculated creative decision to highlight part of The George Hotel facade with sunlight, and leave the rest of the building out of the frame.

Which brings us to an observable modern turn. After decades of photographing buildings, we've started constructing them for the image (gram). Photographers no longer shoot film, cost per image are relatively cheap, and they turn over fast. This allow practicing architects to consume an enormous volume of photographs every day. Even if not as reference material, it will slowly influence the way they get inspirations from. I honestly think , you can't absorb that much imagery without being shaped by it.

The result, arguably, is a growing incentive to design buildings that photograph well, the most Instagrammable version of a space, at the expense of the parts and experience of a building that matter when you're actually standing in it. The phenomenon is real enough that The Guardian wrote a piece titled Snapping point: how the world’s leading architects fell under the Instagram spell in 2018 sharing about this phenomenon, and architecture publications have been asking ever since whether design is bending toward what goes viral. I'm not claiming architects consciously design for likes, or that this is a measured, proven effect. But the incentive exists, and incentives shape work whether or not anyone acknowledges them.

Architecture gave photography its first subjects, patient enough for a slow, crude process to work at all. Photography repays the debt by being how most people meet most buildings, and by quietly influencing what gets built. The two crafts don't just share history. They shape each other, and they always have.