In Practice began with a simple irritation. Architectural photography was very good at buildings before occupation, but often rather poor at showing the lives around them. What interested me was less pure. I wanted to see inhabited places, working places, offices where work was made, complete with all the hierarchy and mess.
My own background was not in the quiet, polished world of architecture. I had come through press photography, through riots and rock concerts. My experience was not an obvious match for architectural photography, which prized patience, control, rectitude and visual good manners. The two worlds had different appetites. One was after impact and evidence; the other after poise and persuasion.
The project came from trying to hold those interests together without allowing either to dominate. I was not interested in smuggling photojournalistic chaos into architectural offices, or in making architects look like heroic figures or mythological beings. The work had to be formal enough to take architecture seriously, but alert enough to catch the social reality of practice. Composed enough to suggest importance, yet disordered enough to describe reality.
The technology mattered. The arrival of the first affordable Canon digital camera changed the practical possibilities of the project. It gave me speed, without the cost and caution of film. At the same time, using tilt-and-shift lenses intended for 35mm cameras allowed a degree of architectural discipline to remain in the image. That combination made the series possible: a controlled photograph made under relatively uncontrolled conditions.
Over four months in 2004, I made around fifty portraits of architectural practices. In retrospect, it was sprung on an unsuspecting profession. Offices that were used to being judged through buildings were suddenly being looked at as subjects themselves. Their studios, their habits, their seating arrangements, their tidiness, their cultivated disorder. It was revealing because it was not quite what architectural culture had prepared itself to reveal.
Isabel Allen and the Architects’ Journal understood the risk. We were keen to avoid the calamity of Architectural Review’s Manplan series, whose ambition and visual force had come close to bankrupting the magazine. Manplan was a heroic precedent, but also a warning.
We wanted pictures that had bite, but not pictures of dystopian bleakness.
That distinction mattered throughout In Practice. A compelling photograph can be critical without being cynical. It can notice vanity, performance, order, exhaustion, absurdity and self-belief without sneering at any of it.
These are portraits of a profession arranging itself for the camera, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, a fascinating glimpse into a world, architectural and photographic, on the cusp of change.
