How Not to Train an Architectural Photographer

I originally took the three-year diploma course in Professional Photography at Ealing Technical College (now incorporated into the University of West London). I went there after abandoning my studies in fine art at Brighton College of Art, where I was taught nothing and saw nothing relevant to the real world being created by anyone there, myself included. 

Ealing Technical College has two claims to fame. The first one is Freddy Mercury, he attended Ealing School of Art, which occupied the third floor of the main building, just below the School of Photography. The second was Kitten Kong, a 1971 episode of The Goodies which was filmed using the Ealing Tech buildings as backdrop. (St Pauls and the Post Office Tower were added later!) The giant kitten paw-prints remained in the car-park for some time. I don’t know if anybody thought to photograph those, but then we didn’t know how long the popularity of the delightfully silly TV show would last.

Doomed Terrace, Highgate, 1971

Whilst at Ealing, I found the tutors were very practical, narrow-minded and taught exactly and only what they knew.  It still felt more relevant than fine art, I was learning practical skills which I knew I could apply to a number of different fields.  Architectural photography was the last on a list of jobs we were told we could aspire to. It came way behind fashion photography, advertising, photojournalism, portraiture, wedding photography and even medical photography.

We were allowed to try our hands at architectural photography, but it wasn’t actually taught, beyond how to use a rising front camera to create the effect of a building being photographed as a vertical rather than a tapering image.  This meant, if you wanted to be seen to be serious about




photographing the exterior of buildings, that it was necessary to carry around a huge metal case containing a five by four inch metal monorail camera, several lenses, a number of dark slides loaded with sheets of film, a dark-cloth to hide under and a great, heavy tripod. That was fine for the larger men on the course, especially those who owned cars. I was one of only seven women in the three year groups, I was small and had no car. However I did have a boyfriend.

Local shopping experience

We carted the gear across London on the tube and made a joint project out of documenting what were at the time possibly the most unglamorous buildings in London. In the least posh area of Highgate, urban decay was taking place. This was due to planning blight which had cleared most of the residents from streets of perfectly sound, but then (this was the early 1970’s) very unfashionable Victorian Terraces.  These  houses, which  were not slums and had been people's homes for more than one hundred years, were being gradually demolished to make way for new housing and a dual carriageway.

We photographed the locals, the few remaining run-down shops and the doomed terraces, with their still delightful architectural features, where the squatters had moved in. They were perfectly friendly to students and non-hostile photographers, squatting for them was not driven by anti-social urges, it was a political activity. They took us indoors to see what they were doing with the interiors of the houses. It wasn’t hugely impressive, but then they had no funds. We shot indoors with a Pentax Spotmatic 35mm camera and outdoors mostly with the big monorail camera.  

Transport links...

We went back to college and I spent a week in the darkrooms making numerous black and white prints of our photographs.  We then wrote two essays, one more suitable for his course (he wasn’t studying photography) and submitted the project to both our sets of tutors.  We both received good marks for the project, but my tutors never told me that this could be anything to do with architectural photography, despite all our efforts with the monorail camera.

Their opinion seemed to be, if you absolutely must photograph a building, it will obviously be an IMPORTANT building, therefore you should make it properly vertical, or it won’t look important enough.  Those buildings I had photographed in Highgate were obviously totally unimportant. Therefore, when I left Ealing School of Photography, I had the impression that architectural photography was an extremely narrow field, in which important structures should be photographed to look impressively vertical. Nothing else was involved.

Since I left I have seen others who were on my course go on to work in television, journalism, environmentalism, fashion, advertising and even to be court photographer for the King of Nepal; but I’m not aware that anyone else ended up specialising in architectural photography, which is not surprising considering the lack of encouragement.  It has only recently struck me that even then I had already begun to work in this particular specialisation and found it very interesting and highly relevant to the real world. Everybody needs buildings.