There is a kind of light photographers are taught to avoid: flat, grey, shadowless. For one of my series it is the only light that works. For the other I want the opposite — full sun, hard edges, shadows you could cut yourself on. This is a note on light in architecture photography — light as a rule rather than an atmosphere, and on why each body of work gets exactly one.
Sun: light that draws
For Fremde Fassaden I prefer sun and shadow. Hard light is a draughtsman — it separates the planes of a façade, sharpens every edge, and adds a second architecture on top of the first: the drawn one. In Visby the shadow of a gabled roof lies on a plaster wall like a signature; in one Kreuzberg picture a single shadow divides the frame in two. The colour in this series is shifted afterwards — a decision, not a record — and hard light is what makes the surfaces firm enough to carry that decision.
Cloud: light that levels
For Auf Augenhöhe the rule is inverted: overcast sky, flat light, no shadows on the wall. The series shows housing façades with the roller shutters down, and its colour is found, not shifted — ordinary development, nothing pushed. Under a grey sky a wall stops performing. No drama, no golden edge, no borrowed mood — what remains is colour and proportion, which is all the series claims. Flat light keeps every wall honest, and it keeps the pictures comparable to one another, which is what a series is.
Ten minutes in August
How strict is the rule? This strict: on the twentieth of August I photographed two walls in the same streets, ten minutes apart. In the first frame the sun was out — a windowsill threw a sharp shadow across the wall, and the picture broke the series before it entered it. Then a cloud came through. The second frame is in Auf Augenhöhe. The first is waiting for a properly grey noon, when I will go back and take it again. Between the two pictures nothing changed except the sky — which is another way of saying everything changed.
Light, in this work, is not what makes a picture beautiful. It is what makes a picture belong.
