Adam Davies

Façades & Interiors

The large-format camera is well adapted for architectural photography. With this type of camera the lens can tilt, swing, rise, and shift, independently from the film-back. These movements change the angle of focus and skew the perspective of the composition. Practically, it lets a photographer straighten the lines of a building or change the depth-of-field so that two different elements (at different distances) are in focus simultaneously.

When photographing architecture, I utilize these unique camera attributes. By capturing the photograph on 8 × 10 inch sheet-film, I obtain a negative with extremely high resolution that allows me to emphasize the detail and materiality of the structure. Particularly in photographs of façades and interiors, I am interested in compressing the visual space within the picture to emphasize the complex relationships between different elements. With careful framing, alignment, and depth of field, I create compositions that emphasize the immersive, surprising, and often disorientating attributes of the architectural space.

Introductory Quote

Frames are both the framing device—conforming, regular, solid—and the framed material—questioning, distorting, and displacing. Occasionally the framing device can itself become the object of distortions and the framed material be conformist and orderly.

— Bernard Tschumi

Portfolio

18th Street NW, Washington DC pigment print 102 × 82 cm 40" × 32" 2014
Surface of an industrial building that has been decorated with line art and a false sky to attempt to match surrounding historic architecture.
Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC pigment print 102 × 82 cm 40" × 32" 2017
Painted mural of a series of arches overlooking flowers and landscape on an abandoned brick wall.
Fort D. A. Russell, Marfa pigment print 102 × 82 cm 40" × 32" 2016
Landscape painted by German WWII prisoners-of-war painted on the interior of United States military barracks, surounding a door to the outside.
Round Top Cement Hill, Maryland pigment print 102 × 82 cm 40" × 32" 2017
The image layers three different planes of view each containing bricks in different patterns an sizes.
E Street SE, Washington DC pigment print 102 × 82 cm 40" × 32" 2014
Fogged, tinted, and stained windows on a powerplant designed to look like a modernist building.
Water Street, Washington DC pigment print 102 × 82 cm 40" × 32" 2013
Open doorway into a pier of a bridge crossing the Potomac river (this structure has been replaced by a new bridge).
Riggs Library, Washington DC pigment print 102 × 82 cm 40" × 32" 2017
Historic Georgetown library, facing arched window with stained glass.
Riggs Library B, Washington DC pigment print 82 × 102 cm 32" × 40" 2017
Historic Georgetown library, viewing multiple floors of shelves containing rare books.
Peabody Skylight, Baltimore pigment print 102 × 82 cm 40" × 32" 2020
Frontal view of cabling and i-beams layout within the skylight system designed by Ziger|Snead Architects.
Peabody Skylight B, Baltimore pigment print 82 × 102 cm 32" × 40" 2020
Diagonal view of cabling and i-beams layout within the skylight system designed by Ziger|Snead Architects.

© 2021-2022 Adam Davies