Architecture, sculpture and art

Architecture photography has always been a passion of mine, and since I never travel without my camera kit, I tend to spend a good deal of my time taking pictures of the places I visit or pass through. Here is a selection of images devoted to architecture, sculpture and art.

A journey through time

Architecture is a kind of time machine. And appearances can be deceptive. You might think you’ve been transported back to the Middle Ages, only to discover that the building you’ve been admiring — the one you took for a mediaeval castle — was in fact rebuilt in the nineteenth century.

That’s architecture for you: it lies and tells the truth at the same time.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
Winston Churchill

And indeed, Winston Churchill — if he ever actually said this — was right: architecture shapes us in exactly the same way that we shaped it in the first place.

Architecture photography portfolio gallery

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A passion for Architecture Photography

Architecture photography is where my passion for places and cultures comes into its own. I have roamed cities and regions for years — partly for business, partly by inclination — always with a camera in tow, always looking up when everyone else was looking at their phones. Brittany, the Ariège, Paris, London, Prague, Marrakech: every place leaves a visual residue that only the camera can properly fix.

But there is more to it than geography. My interest in architecture is fundamentally cultural. Buildings are documents. They record the ambitions, the anxieties and the aesthetic obsessions of the people who commissioned them and the era that produced them. A nineteenth-century neo-Gothic façade tells you as much about Victorian England as any history book — arguably more, because you can stand in front of it and feel it.

That is the angle I bring to architectural photography: not the technical survey, not the estate agent’s flattering wide-angle, but the eye of someone who wants to understand what a building is actually saying. Which is why the human element is never far away in my images. A silhouette in a doorway, a reflection in glass, the shadow of a cornice on a stone wall. Architecture, to my mind, only makes full sense in relation to the people who inhabit it, pass through it, or simply stop and stare.