Jan Madeus · Berlin

Abstract Architecture Photography

What it is · how the pictures are made · where to see them

Abstract architecture photography does not photograph buildings. It photographs what a building is made of — planes, edges, colour, and the light crossing them — and it stops short of the point where the building could be identified.

The distinction matters. Most photographs of architecture are made to answer a question: what does this building look like, and who designed it. Those pictures are useful, they belong in portfolios and magazines, and I make them too. An abstract photograph of the same wall answers nothing. It offers a surface, a division of the frame and a decision about colour, and then it stays there. What you do with it is your business.

How the pictures are made

My way into this comes from painting. I studied painting and graphics before I worked seriously with a camera, and the habit that survived is standing in front of a surface long enough for it to stop being a wall.

The method itself is dull to describe. A frontal position, so that nothing converges. No people, no weather, no hour that flatters. I wait for light that crosses the plane rather than lighting it, which in Berlin means a few days in the year per wall. The colour is shifted afterwards — not to improve the building, but to change the temperature at which you read it. Everything else stays where it was found.

What it is not

It is not décor. A print chosen to match a sofa is a legitimate product and a large industry supplies it well and cheaply. These are editioned works: signed, numbered, printed on Hahnemühle cotton paper in Berlin, in editions of 15, 10 and 5, and priced so that the edition means something. If what you want is an inexpensive poster of a building, the marketplaces do that better than I do.

It is also not architectural documentation. If you need a building recorded accurately for a competition entry or a publication, that is a different job, done differently.

Where to see the work

Fremde Fassaden is the main body: fifteen colour-shifted façades, most of them from Kreuzberg and Berlin-Mitte, two made beyond Berlin. Das Haus gegenüber follows a single block over time. Metamorphosis works in diptychs, and Abstract is the black-and-white end of the same interest.

Abstract architecture photograph, Berlin: an ochre wall, a pink wall and a pale gable between them under a graded sky

Poetry of the City — Kreuzberg

Three colour fields and one sliver of sky.
Abstract architecture photograph in Berlin-Kreuzberg: an orange block seen from the corner with a teal panel and four pipe stubs

Colour Block — Kreuzberg

An orange corner, a teal panel, four pipe stubs.
Abstract architecture photograph in Berlin-Mitte: salmon relief panels and a violet block with boarded-up windows

Komische Oper — Berlin-Mitte

Three buildings meeting without touching.
Square abstract architecture photograph in Berlin-Kreuzberg: a diagonal shadow across a yellow band and a violet wall

Blinds, Kreuzberg — II

One diagonal against a rectilinear picture.
Abstract architecture photograph: stepped planes of pink, orange and green render with one dark slot between them, Berlin

Apartment Block, Kreuzberg — II

Pink, orange and green, stepping over each other.
Abstract wall photograph in Visby, Gotland: the shadow of a gable lying flat across rendered stone

Visby — Gotland I

A gable’s shadow, flat across old render.

Prints and enquiries

Every work shown here is available as a signed, numbered archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308, in editions of 15, 10 and 5. Prices rise as an edition sells; once it is sold out it is never reprinted. How the editions work explains the sizes, the paper and the certificate.

For a specific wall, tell me the size and the light and I will send a visualisation at true scale.

Prints & editions Enquire