New York City Architectural Photography

Photography is a highly used communication method in architecture that gives us remote access to the natural and constructed environments and the ideas that enable creating them. Photography’s coincidence with architecture needs no discussion as architecture is ‘ideally stable’¹ and is becoming a frequent photography subject. However, there is still a gap that waits to be filled with exploratory ways in relating these two.

Architectural photography as a critical practice can mediate creating new ideas on space, time, and architecture. It becomes a means to study forms, materials, and life through the transcription of light. While making these qualities visible, photography can lead us to think differently about our environments by creating a rapture in how we recollect those spaces.

I had a visual-conceptual plan in creating this project. I selected famous architectural locations in Manhattan and brought those diverse atmospheres together with certain visual commonalities. I aspired to push the fixed qualities in architectural photography. Instead of clarity, soft light, and tranquility, I looked for ambiguities, high-contrast, and dynamism.

In the photographs, the sharpness of building geometries is softened and emphasized through the city’s dynamism. The black-and-white enhances the built form and highlights how people’s use and movement transform those spaces. Silhouettes, shadows, motion, and reflections create a common ground within all that differs, and, through them, multilayered instances emerge for further readings and recollections.

Duygu Tüntaş is an architecture-based academician and architectural photographer. She has produced this series of photographs during her stay in New York City for her Ph.D. research. Follow Duygu on Instagram.

¹ Claire Zimmerman. Photographic Architecture in The Twentieth Century. University of Minnesota Press. 2014: