One of the most rewarding challenges of architectural photography is telling a building’s story through the people who occupy it. I typically look for opportunities to capture authentic experiences that exist in and around these spaces while highlighting the aesthetic, innovations, and elements of the architecture.
Before becoming an in-house architectural photographer at CannonDesign, my background was in portraiture and event photography. I focused on capturing the essence of human experience—an approach heavily influenced by street photography. As a result, much of my architectural photography features movement and life unfolding within occupied environments, rather than just-finished, essentially empty projects prior to occupancy.
This style has become increasingly difficult to capture during the pandemic because people are not connecting in public. Though many of my firm’s projects have moved forward during the pandemic and are ready to be photographed, they sit mostly empty. How do you capture life in buildings devoid of people? It is not impossible, but it does require a new level of patience and creativity.
Below is a series of photos I took immediately before the onset of the pandemic and then thereafter to document my changing experience as an architectural photographer.
Two weeks before everything began shutting down in March, I photographed the Ohlone Community College academic core, in Fremont, Calif. As the campus began to clear out for the day, I turned to the areas surrounding the exterior stairs that connect each academic building to courtyards and pedestrian bridges.
It was the start of the golden hour. I was taking detail shots as the sun cast long shadows on the steps. Two students began walking down the stairs. Suddenly, one hopped onto the handrail and slid to the bottom. My heart was racing—I had captured that fleeting moment. When you become an observer rather than as the choreographer of a scene, people rarely disappoint with their interactions within a space. Instead of acting out life, they are living it. These moments have magic.
This has become my favorite image from the session. Encompassing the optimistic and exciting spirit of a college campus, it froze the perfect moment in time before the world, as most of us knew it, ended.
After the initial shutdowns canceled many project shoots, I didn’t know how I would resume my photography. How could photos of empty spaces look vibrant? Without people, there are no real stories—just visual pauses in places where life should be happening. I knew I would need planning and a renewed creative approach.
I reconsidered the concepts of life and motion in photography. By portraying the relationship between a building and its environment in different ways, architectural photographers can translate reality differently.
At Richard J. Daley College’s Manufacturing Technology and Engineering Center, in Chicago, I captured the various ways light reflected off each elevation as the sun moved across the sky. Although the building was mostly empty, its surroundings were active: Traffic buzzed by on a nearby thruway and airplanes streamed to and from Chicago’s Midway Airport. This movement energized the scene and gave the building vibrancy and life. I made architecture the centerpiece—an anchor to all the external energy.
At Upwork’s new Chicago office expansion, I had to be creative with the limited crew I had. As the sun began to set, my colleague and I took a break and talked about the remaining spaces on our shot list. We decided to infuse ourselves into certain shots to ensure life resonated in the images.
I took several frames of my colleague sitting in the café area, which would have been filled with activity and crowds pre-pandemic. Then he left the scene, and I sat close to where he had been sitting. I took a few photos of myself using a remote trigger. I combined these frames in post-production so we appear to be sitting for a coffee break. Though the final image doesn’t show a bustling and lively café, we do add life to the space. And the exhaustion on our faces after a long day from sanitizing, photographing, and then resanitizing every area we touched was all too real.
The practice of patching together multiple exposures was also invaluable to my images of the Purdue University's Nils K. Nelson Bioscience Innovation Building, in Hammond, Ind. The true energy of the dynamic space could not be fully captured because many students had opted for distance learning for safety reasons.
Much of this session was an exercise in pure patience. I was highlighting a three-story stairwell with views to the outside and into glass-enclosed laboratories and classrooms. Each image took approximately 45 minutes of waiting with my tripod for student passersby to make the stairwell appear as vibrant and active as the design had intended.
Below, on the left are two of the final edited images of the stairwell as I envisioned it would look on a busy day. The images on the right show one frame from each composite that reveals how desolate the spaces truly were.
Architects and designers often express concern about the presence of face masks in architectural photography. They worry the images may soon look dated or convey the wrong message about the project in the long term. I understand these concerns: Including people in architectural photography should complement rather than distract from design. However, these photos are tangible records of this fascinating period in history. In their own way, they show our collective resilience and willingness to work together for the greater good. Rather than diverting the focus from the architecture, these images support how design can create a space in which we can adapt to new circumstances as we learn, grow, and move forward.
At Townsend Hall, a renovated student residence at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I spent most of the assignment documenting empty rooms and lounge areas. Then I turned a corner in a hallway and spotted a group of students laughing and socializing outside their rooms. I felt pure joy: It was the first real interactivity among students I had seen in the building. Besides the moment being perfect for photography, I felt a jolt of hope that we soon may be able to return to lives filled with connection, socialization, and memory-making together.
Merging real life and design is ultimately what architecture is all about. Photographing occupied spaces can be messy and chaotic, but it is honest. The beauty is in the authenticity. The pandemic has made finding those authentic moments tougher, but it is far from impossible.
Good design creates a seamless background for authentic life and genuine experiences. As a photographer, my job is to be there and ready for when these stories unfold.
