Berenice Abbott's changing New York, Julius Shulman's California houses, and the Bechers' industrial towers show how differently photographers can see buildings. Their work gives you starting points for studying light, composition, and the stories a place can tell.
This selection brings together 11 photographers and partnerships whose work explores architecture. Some photographed buildings for architects. Others approached them through documentary or fine art photography. If you want practical steps for photographing architecture, our guide covers the techniques.
What Is Architectural Photography?
Architectural photography takes buildings and other built structures as its subject. It includes interiors, exteriors, industrial sites, and the relationship between a building and its surroundings.
Some photographers focus on pattern or texture. Others use blocks of color and clean lines for minimalist art. A photograph can describe an entire street or isolate a stairway, window, or wall. A series can show how a city changes or compare structures built for the same purpose.
Bridge Street, Mexico, Maine, July 30, 1974 © Stephen Shore
Grand Central Station, New York, circa 1930. Photo: Hal Morey / Fox Photos / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
11 Famous Architectural Photographers You Should Know
The profiles below explain what each photographer is known for and what to look for in their work. The Bechers appear together because their photographs were a joint practice. For more names, see our list of architecture photographers to follow on Instagram.
Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott returned to New York in 1929 after working in Paris. The city's rapid changes became the subject of her Changing New York project. Her black and white photographs place streets, older buildings, and new construction in relation to one another.
Start with the photographs in Abbott's 1929 New York album. Look at how her viewpoints show the scale of a building and its place in the street. Her work encourages you to photograph the city as a changing environment, with attention to what stands beside a landmark as well as the landmark itself.
Julius Shulman
Julius Shulman's photograph of the Stahl House in 1960 helped define the image of California modernism. The house, designed by Pierre Koenig, is also known as Case Study House No. 22. Shulman's photographs connected modern architecture with the life people could lead inside it.
Study the relationship between the glass-walled room, its occupants, and the city beyond. The setting helps explain the building's appeal. His later work included Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, which he photographed in 2004.
© Julius Shulman – House Case Study #22
Lucien Hervé
Lucien Hervé used deep shadows, tight framing, and strong contrasts to describe architectural space. His collaboration with Le Corbusier began in 1949 after he photographed the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille. That work gives a starting point for exploring his approach to modern architecture.
Look at how a stair, wall, or patch of light can carry a composition. Hervé's photographs often turn building details into near-abstract arrangements. To study that approach, choose a small part of a building and pay attention to the shape of the shadow beside it.
© Lucien Herve
Hilla and Bernd Becher
Hilla and Bernd Becher photographed industrial structures such as water towers, blast furnaces, and gas tanks. They grouped pictures of the same kind of structure into grids called typologies. A consistent approach to framing makes differences in shape easier to compare.
Their influence also reached a generation of world-class photographers. Bernd became a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1976, and the pair helped shape the photographers associated with the Düsseldorf School. Their work offers a lesson in building a series: keep the way you photograph each subject consistent, then see what the comparison reveals.
Becher – Water Towers
Walker Evans
Walker Evans was a documentary photographer and photojournalist whose subjects included churches, storefronts, houses, and roadside signs. His Depression-era work records how people lived through the buildings and objects around them. American Photographs, published alongside his 1938 MoMA exhibition, is a place to start.
Look for the everyday details in his pictures: lettering, window displays, worn surfaces, and the spacing between neighboring buildings. They give a place its character. Evans's work shows why an ordinary street can deserve the same attention as a celebrated piece of architecture.
The Church of the Nazarene. Tennessee © Walker Evans
Robert Adams
Robert Adams photographed the changing American West. In books such as The New West, he examined expanding suburbs and their relationship with the land around them. Buildings are part of a wider setting in his work, alongside roads, open ground, vegetation, and light.
Study how much space he gives to that setting. A house at the edge of a development can tell a different story from the same house photographed on its own. His work invites you to consider what your framing says about the relationship between construction and the landscape.
A church in Hernandez, New Mexico, ca. 1964. © Robert Adams.
David Goldblatt
David Goldblatt photographed South African society during and after apartheid. In South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, buildings and landscapes become evidence of the values and power that shaped the country. Churches, monuments, homes, and developments can carry social meaning as well as architectural form.
His work rewards reading the caption alongside the photograph. Ask who built the structure, what purpose it serves, and what its setting reveals. That context can change how you understand an otherwise quiet view of a building.
Speculative development by a property developer in putatively ‘authentic Cape Dutch’ style, Agatha, Tzaneen, Transvaal (From South Africa: The Structure of Things Then) ©David Goldblatt
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha brought ordinary roadside architecture into his books and art. Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) collected photographs made along the route between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City. Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) extended his interest in recording a place through a sequence of images.
Start with the subjects he chose: gas stations and the buildings along a street. Their repeated presence becomes the organizing idea. His books encourage you to think about how photographs work together, and how a familiar route can give a project its structure.
Standard, Amarillo, Texas © Ed Ruscha
Carol Highsmith
Carol Highsmith's archive at the Library of Congress records American buildings, historic preservation, urban settings, and daily life. Her subjects range from landmark architecture to barns, motor courts, and roadside art. That range gives attention to places that can disappear or change without attracting much notice.
Explore the collection with a specific subject in mind, such as a type of building or a town you know. Compare the wider views with photographs that record details. Her work is a reminder to document what gives a place its identity while those features are still there.
© Carol Highsmith
Lewis Baltz
Lewis Baltz made stark black and white photographs of industrial parks, suburbs, and other everyday developments. His work is associated with New Topographics, the photographic approach brought together in the 1975 exhibition of that name. Robert Adams, the Bechers, and Stephen Shore were also included.
Look at his treatment of walls, windows, and edges. A plain facade can become a study of geometry while remaining a record of a particular kind of development. The absence of people does not remove the human story: these are places people designed, built, and used.
South Wall, Unoccupied Industrial Structure, 16812 Milliken, Irvine © Lewis Baltz
Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore photographed American streets, motels, gas stations, and other everyday places in color. His series American Surfaces and Uncommon Places connect architecture with the wider experience of traveling through a place. His work was also included in the 1975 New Topographics exhibition.
In Uncommon Places, look at how buildings share the frame with roads, signs, vehicles, and open space. Color helps connect or separate these elements. Shore's photographs invite you to spend time with an ordinary scene and notice how its parts fit together.
West 9th Avenue, Amarillo, Texas, October 2, 1974 © Stephen Shore
Conclusion: Famous Architectural Photographers
These photographers give you different ways to study a building. Start with Shulman for the relationship between a house and its occupants, Hervé for light and shadow, or the Bechers for a consistent series. Evans, Adams, Goldblatt, Ruscha, Highsmith, and Shore also show how much everyday places can reveal.
Choose one approach before your next walk. Photograph a building in its street, isolate its shapes and lines, or compare several structures with the same purpose. Then review what your choices of viewpoint, light, and framing have made visible.
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