What is architectural photography?
Architectural photography shows buildings and other structures, outside and inside. Architects, magazines and developers use it to present new projects, and archives use it to record buildings before they change or disappear. A good architectural photograph shows the form of a building, its materials and how light moves through it.
Main approaches
Exteriors. The whole building in its setting: street, landscape or skyline. The photographer chooses the time of day so that the sun falls on the main facade.
Interiors. Rooms, stairs and halls. The main problem is the large difference in brightness between windows and the darker room.
Details and abstraction. Close views of surfaces, edges, light and shadow. Hélène Binet works this way with buildings by Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Peter Zumthor, using a large-format film camera.
Buildings in use. Iwan Baan (born 1975) often includes people and the surrounding city, to show how a building is actually used.
Documentation and typologies. Neutral, systematic pictures for archives or art projects, for example the water towers and industrial buildings photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher, the teachers of the Düsseldorf School.
by Julius Shulman
History
Buildings were among the first subjects of photography because they do not move during long exposures. In 1851 Prosper Mérimée, France’s inspector general of historical monuments, hired five photographers, Édouard Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq and Auguste Mestral, to record old buildings across France. This project, the Mission héliographique, is one of the first large photographic surveys of architecture.
Around 1900, Eugène Atget spent about 30 years photographing old Paris with a wooden view camera on glass plates: streets, courtyards, doors and shop windows. In the 1930s Berenice Abbott, who had photographed Atget in 1927 and saved much of his archive after his death, photographed the fast-changing city for Changing New York. The project was supported by the Federal Art Project and published as a book in 1939.
Modern architecture after the Second World War made architectural photographers famous. Julius Shulman photographed houses by Richard Neutra and other Californian modernists. His night view of Case Study House #22 in Los Angeles (1960), designed by Pierre Koenig, is one of the best-known architectural photographs. In New York, Ezra Stoller photographed Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and Eero Saarinen’s buildings. Balthazar Korab, a trained architect, also photographed Saarinen’s work, above all the TWA Flight Center, often with a handheld 35mm camera.
Techniques
Straight verticals. When you tilt the camera up at a tall building, its sides lean inward (converging verticals). Architectural photographers keep the camera level and use a view camera or a tilt-shift lens to move the lens up instead. The lines can also be corrected later in software, but this crops the picture.
Light and time of day. Check where the sun will be. Many exteriors are made at dusk, when the sky is still blue and the interior lights are on, so that the building glows from inside.
Bright windows. In interiors, photographers often combine several exposures, or add flash, to show both the room and the view outside.
Viewpoint. Walk around the building first. A slightly higher position, for example from a window across the street, often shows the shape better than a view from the pavement.
How to start
Start with buildings near you, at different times of day. A wide-angle lens is useful, but do not go wider than you need: very wide lenses stretch the corners. A tripod helps with level framing and long exposures inside. Ask permission before you photograph private interiors, and check the rules for commercial use of images of buildings in your country.
Books to start with
Shooting Space: Architecture in Contemporary Photography by Elias Redstone (Phaidon, 2014). A survey of how artists and photographers today show architecture.
Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography by John Comazzi (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). Korab’s pictures of mid-century modern buildings.
Berenice Abbott, Changing New York (1939). Abbott’s record of New York in the 1930s, made with the support of the Federal Art Project.
by Hélène Binet
Legacy
Architectural photographs often shape how a building is remembered. Many people know the Stahl House or Fallingwater from photographs rather than from a visit. Surveys such as the Mission héliographique and the work of Atget and Abbott also became historical records of buildings and streets that no longer exist.
Discover architectural photographers · Architectural photography in the Photopedia Dictionary
Last updated: November 2026
