A changing façade architectural photography

Buildings say a lot about culture. They say a lot about us and can inform the way we live. Traditionally, people who enjoyed engaging with design and architecture could do so via professional publications or specialised magazines. These were characterised by high-end production values and glorious photographs that took readers on a journey of the buildings and their surrounds. Now, anyone can explore and engage with architecture with the click of a mouse. Images of buildings are everywhere, so what is architectural photography and what makes it different to other genres?

Reality check

Dianna Snape is a Melbourne-based photographer specialising in architecture, interior, and landscape photography. Her work features regularly in leading architectural and design magazines. For Snape, the commercial reality and discipline of documenting a building is very different to the pictures of buildings so prevalent on Instagram. “It’s about respecting and understanding the space, and telling a story. That’s what differentiates an architectural photographer. Of course there are good images [on Instagram], but it’s not what we do, and not how an architect would choose to document their life’s work,” she says.

Snape believes it’s important that people understand that there are also different types of photography within the genre. “There is a big delineation between interior design-driven work and architectural work. Interior designers have perfected showing objects within a space, and their materiality. It’s an object-orientated genre, versus photography where the architecture is dominant and there’s a spatial quality,”