Ten ideas on architectural photography and cinema II
Cinema and architectural photography tell stories but they don't do it the same way. What is different about them? Everyone loves a good story, don’t you think?
If you have followed me here, you already know that in the first part of this post I have discussed about framing, time, space and sound and how I relate them in these two disciplines when I work with my camera in the streets. Here there are five more ideas that complete my argumentation –and one day I will have to talk about cinematographers, but this will remain still pending–:
6. Cinema works with emotions and architectural photography does it with experiences. The actors who play a fiction appeal to basic feelings with which the spectator can identify to involve him in the story and lead him through it. Architectural photography, by its nature apparently closer to documentary or street photography, interprets a space and transfers to the viewer the sensations of what the photographer saw and felt in the place: as a matter of fact, making photography the vehicle of this experience is its greatest power by using art codes to lure the viewer and captivate him.
7. The role of the screenwriter in architectural photography is diffuse. If the photographer works on assignment, the scenario to be explained is almost always determined by the client –an architect, an interior designer, a developer– or by the program of the architecture project itself that often points to a specific way of approaching it. The photographer is responsible for assuming the functions of the movie director who builds the narrative and develops it but, above all, to give harmony and visual consistency to the communication, elaborating each frame and building the continuity of the story as the director of photography.
8. Editing in cinema puts together and orders the pieces that build the narration, adds to the continuity the punctuation marks that unfolds it and takes the viewer by the hand all along the whole story, from the beginning to the end. Architectural photography considered as a professional assignment is not able to create such a narration through editing beyond the moment of delivering the final images to the client because the photographer will never know how many, or how or in what order his photographs will be published. Enjoying that degree of creative control is reserved for a presentation or a photo book or, if you are really lucky, in the space of an exhibition hall.
9. A movie needs the audience to watch it whole to get into the story, to understand and taste it. A series of photographs may not be contemplated in their entirety, nor in the order in which it was created or even as an individual image. The architecture photographer has to elaborate a group of images that attracts the viewer, entice him to continue looking at them and influence him to know more about what’s in the frame. You have to achieve that with the complete series of photographs and, even more, with every one of them separately and isolated from the rest. Each photograph has to work alone to be both a part of the overall sense of the story and an invitation to discover the rest of the story.
10. Cinema and architectural photography are collective endeavors in which all the parties involved in a project share a common goal. Photography is a much more lonely work on the ground compared to the multitude of people who shoot a movie but, in the same way, it must respond to the interests and expectations of all those who trust you as an author to explain their architecture project in photographs and present it to the scrutiny of a global audience. Keep in mind that, as in the film industry, you never work alone and that you are an important creative piece of a very precise gear whose task is none other than communicating with images.
Photography and cinema are visual arts that, like all other arts, influence each other and are part of both a tradition and a present that they always question to progress. It is up to each one of us to find our own voice as an author, whether in photography or in cinema: if we can learn to be a better photographer by watching the work of painters or sculptors, we can also do it from filmmakers such as François Truffaut, Yasuhiro Ozu, Wes Anderson, Terrence Malick, Federico Fellini or Quentin Tarantino.
You have a camera. Only you will know if you are going to use it as a tool or as an instrument.