Art & Architecture
“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.”
I love photographing things that don’t move and don’t ask stupid questions. I could never be a wedding photographer. By the time I set up the shot, they’d be divorced, and I would be living in a van down by the river. Here’s a small collection of my photos of things that haven’t as much as blinked in decades or millennia. Still, photographing art and architecture is not as simple as it sounds. The biggest problem is people like me: the lumbering masses of meat and hats clumsily navigating the narrow hallways of museums with their pretentious photographic equipment.
People like me drive me crazy. Some of the photos you see here took me nearly an hour to make: you know, just standing there like a statue, waiting for the other (“stupid”) tourists to get out of the shot. I’ve visited the Louvre five days in a row and hardly seen anything outside my camera’s viewfinder. Another big problem with photographing museums is avoiding a documentary-style approach. You’re not there to catalog the exhibits. People looking at your photos want a sense of being at the museum, not just a photographically-accurate reproduction of Rembrandt’s Danaë.
When someone looks at your photos and thinks, “I shall go there and see all these things for myself,” you have accomplished what any photographer can reasonably hope to achieve: you have captured their imagination. And as for Rembrandt, he’ll still be there waiting for them.
