Aesthetica Magazine – Building the Picture
The story of architecture in photography is being written. Vitra Design Museum foregrounds what’s next through the lens of one key image-maker.
“It still remains almost unknown for an architectural magazine to commission or publish an architectural study on a building that has been occupied and used for some time,” he writes. How, then, to bridge the gap between aesthetics and authenticity? Dutch photographer Iwan Baan (b. 1975) is doing just that. Born in Alkmaar, outside Amsterdam, Baan has earned recognition for challenging the norm of static, sanitised, solitary images, devoid of context. Instead, he shows a sense of narrative: how people interact with structures, as well as their motivations for building. Like Donat, Baan strives to “tell the story of places, showing what makes them specific and particular to their locations.”