Pygmalion Karatzas
Architectural, Fine Art & Commercial Photography

Arcspace.com is an architecture website that features today’s most creative projects as well as the most influential of the past. It was founded in 1999 by architect and independent curator Kirsten Kiser. Since 2012 it is run and operated by the Danish Architecture Centre. DAC’s goal is to disseminate knowledge about architecture and urban development, to create a broad interest for new ideas traversing traditional boundaries, and to show how architecture creates cultural and economic assets for people, the industry and society at large. The Camera section is an online exhibition dedicated to professional architectural photography as well as artistic photography related to the built environment. As photo editor and in collaboration with chief editor Robert Martin we will be selecting and presenting photographers’ work, exclusive q&a discussions, and various stories and news related to the fields of communication and visual discourse. 

 

With the selection of photographers and the q&a discussions we explore architectural photography aspects such as: the background biography and influences of the photographers, the overall vision and approach, the relationship between architects and photographers, specific key projects in assignments and personal work, film and digital, print and online means of production and distribution, business aspects of the industry, editing, commercial and artistic expressions, gear and technological advancements, awareness and transformative experiences, the interaction between people and their built environment, movements, styles and sub-genres, future plans and broader collaborations between photography and architecture, workshops, teaching, apprenticeship.

 

In 2013 with the exhibition ‘Beyond the Assignment: defining photographs of architecture and design’, organized by the Julius Shulman Institute and Woodbury University School of Architecture in Los Angeles, the work of ten renowned American architectural photographers and the contemporary buildings they capture were presented. We are also observing the co-creation of the perception and analysis of architecture from the various perspectives/fields involved in its dissemination: magazine editors, social media platforms along with architects and photographers. This collective work curated by Bilyana Dimitrova is a prime example of editorial architectural photography.  

 

In 2014 the exhibition ‘Constructing Worlds: photography and architecture in the Modern Age’, organized by the Barbican Art Gallery in London, and the companion book by Phaidon ‘Shooting Space: architecture in contemporary photography’ was edited by Elias Redstone. It explores the relationship between architecture and photography in the representation and investigation of various aspects of the built environment: from the transformation of a metropolis after the Great Depression, to the adverse consequences of modernity in the vernacular countryside, from arcane industrial archetypes to urban piecemeal growth in the Middle East and Asia, from a deeper understanding of architects’ intentions to artistically capturing icons of the 20th century, from contemplative images of space to imagined environments, to name a few. With this collection we are introduced to distinguished artistic expressions of architectural photography.  

 

In recent years, the subject matter - architecture itself, has been analysed from an integral framework. Examples of such an approach include the nine-part critical campaign of Architectural Review’s editor Peter Buchanan titled ‘The Big Rethink: towards a complete architecture’ in 2012, introducing Ken Wilber’s integral theory to the architectural audience, which “establishes a new framework for the design of 21st-century buildings and cities”. Another example is the seminal book ‘Integral Sustainable Design: transformative perspectives’ by professor of architecture Mark DeKay from the University of Tennessee Knoxville in 2011 published by Routledge. 

 

Approaching the medium of photography and the subject matter of architecture in a holistic manner, is the underline intention of these series. Applying it to the framing of the project itself, meeting people, institutions and cases who fill in the pieces and enrich the content. Editorial and artistic architectural photography is thus explored further documenting a comprehensive spectrum of the relationships between photography and the built environment. 

​

From the gallery above you can access the full interview of each photographer by clicking on the thumbnails.

You can also view them in monograph magazine format on issuu.