Students’ architectural photos that break conventional boundaries inspired by Hong Kong movie director Wong Kar-wai
- Six students from the University of Hong Kong put a new spin on architectural photography in an exhibition at Hong Kong’s PMQ art and design space
- Inspiration came from Wong’s poetic sense of saturated colour, contrasted light and shadow, such as in the 1994 movie Chungking Express
Architectural photography is graphic design with a camera. It poses special challenges and often requires specific tools, thoughtful approaches and skills to visually communicate every nuance of a design that an architect may have spent years perfecting – be that of a building, an interior or both. These are then expressed in a small number of minimal photographs showing details as well as the overall completed work.
Apart from filling the portfolios of the project team, these images are then published online or in books, magazines or brochures. All of which is to say that architectural photographers need to understand the mindset of their clients to produce a body of working photographs encompassing whole concepts.
So it is exciting to see a group of six bright, young architectural designers in Hong Kong at varying stages of their education beginning to visualise and collaborate on an exhibition of architectural photographs that break down and illustrate design processes.
Their exhibition, In the Light of Matter, is a compilation of architectural model photographs specifically detailing craft, spatial abstraction and materiality – steel, clay, concrete, wood, paper (cardboard) and PLA (polyvinyl alcohol) in 3D printing. The models, on pedestals running along the centre of gallery space at arts and design venue PMQ, represent a series of different approaches to architectural photography.
