Landscape Architectural Photography

Landscape architectural photography is a subgenre of a subgenre, distinct from photographing buildings exclusively and distinct from scenic landscape work. I make images of outdoor spaces for the landscape architects who design them: parks, plazas, campuses, streetscapes, and the grounds of larger building projects. The work is made to do a number of jobs at once, including anchoring a firm's portfolio, supporting RFP or qualifications packages, placing a project in a publication, or strengthening an awards submission. Most of my landscape projects have been across the Midwest and the surrounding region, including Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and northwest Arkansas, with St. Louis and Chicago as the most frequent areas of coverage.

I think landscape architecture is more difficult to photograph well than building architecture, and the main difference is time. A building looks finished the day it opens; a landscape does not. Plantings need a season or more to read the way they were intended, and the right frame often depends on a narrow window of growth and light that may not coincide with the window that flatters the architecture. It often doesn't. I try to plan around that, returning across the season when a project calls for it rather than shooting once at completion and ignoring the state of the ground. It also helps to know what one is looking at: the circulation, the grading, the relationship between hardscape and planting, the moves a landscape architect actually makes. I shoot primarily on medium format, and most projects include at least a few aerial drone frames to demonstrate abstract geometric forms and spatial context.