Photography is an unusual artform, it is not a medium in which you create from nothing, there are elements of the image which you don't control. The level of that control is variable sure, documentary photography you document what is before you, you tend not to manipulate anything, it is pure. At the other end of the spectrum you can create the scene, place people, objects were you want them, fabricate costumes.
And then there is architectural photography. The photography of a what is already an artform. I would argue one of the most wide reaching and easily encountered artforms. But where does this sit in like spectrum. This building is there, someone has made the decision to place a red shard through the building, using it to tie this building in the modern iconography of Melbourne, and particular North Melbourne, where giant yellow and red shards mark the gateway to Melbourne from the international airport. They have decided to build a monolithic extension to a older building.
But they didn't create the sky, the evening light, the shadows, sure they might have considered them, understood that they would some from the west, that the lines would fall a certain way, slightly different each day, but possible yes.
I didn't create either of these things the building, the light, what right do I have to claim that this image is of my making. Is it that the 'discovered' the building in a why that white men have be discovering things that have already existed for hundred of years. Is it that I choose the framing, the square, the landscape, that I placed the angles within the frame, using my knowledge, my experience to understand the pleasing nature of the rule of thirds, I choose the right aperture to make that sky a deeper blue, deepen, sharpen the shadows.
The photo is mine in the sense that it doesn't exist unless I pressed that shutter bottom, no one else was there at the time, even if they were would they have made the same choices? would their choices have been better or worse.
