Part 2: What Matters About This Project?
Part 2: What Matters About This Project?
Finding the story before deciding what to photograph
AEC teams are routinely asked to tell project stories.
By the time a project is complete, there may be years of information surrounding it. Owner objectives, design decisions, engineering solutions, construction challenges, stakeholder priorities, changes in scope, and lessons learned may all be relevant to how the work is eventually communicated.
Project teams understand much of what shaped the completed work. Future audiences do not. The challenge is deciding which parts of that knowledge matter to the way the project will be understood.
A photography plan can cover the expected spaces, features, and views and still miss the relationships or evidence that explain why the project matters. Different disciplines and audiences may also have legitimate reasons to communicate different aspects of the same completed work.
Before asking what should be photographed, there is an earlier question:
WHAT MATTERS ABOUT THIS PROJECT?
The story begins with the project itself. The question is what deserves attention and what photography can help another person understand.
Where to Start Digging
Asking, “What is the story?” can be too broad to be useful. Instead, look for story signals in the completed work and the decisions behind it. This is not a checklist. These are just places to start digging for what matters about the project.
Why Was the Project Needed?
Start with the purpose behind the work and what changed because it exists.
THE PURPOSE
What need, problem, opportunity, or objective gave the project a reason to exist?
WHAT CHANGED
What was added, removed, preserved, connected, improved, or made possible because the work exists?
What Shaped the Project?
Conditions surrounding a project often help explain why the finished work took the form it did.
THE CONDITIONS
What conditions materially influenced the project? What existing circumstances, requirements, or competing priorities shaped the work?
THE RESPONSE
How did the team respond? Where can the influence of those conditions be seen in the completed work?
What Distinguishes the Completed Work?
Look at what is particular to this project, including what the architecture expresses and the decisions and relationships that shaped the result.
IDENTITY AND EXPRESSION
Is there something the architecture was intended to express, reinforce, or make recognizable?
THE DECISIONS
Which consequential design, engineering, planning, landscape, preservation, or construction decisions shaped the result?
THE RELATIONSHIPS
What is significant about the relationship between spaces, systems, buildings, old and new, inside and outside, architecture and landscape, or the project and its larger context?
What Else Are We Missing?
Some important parts of a project may not emerge from its purpose, constraints, major decisions, or architectural relationships.
THE PEOPLE IT SERVES
Who was the project designed to serve? What about their experience of the completed environment is important to understanding the project?
LESS VISIBLE CONTRIBUTIONS
What important technical accomplishment, system, detail, discipline contribution, or distinction could someone unfamiliar with the project overlook?
What This Looks Like in Practice
The story will not emerge from the same place on every project. Sometimes it is found in a relationship that conventional coverage could miss. Sometimes it becomes clearer through the people who use the completed environment.
When the Story Exists Between the Buildings
When Michigan State University commissioned photography of its presence along Grand Rapids’ Medical Mile, the assignment included both ground-level and aerial photography. The relationship among multiple MSU facilities along the corridor was an important part of the planning before production.
Ground-level photography could establish the individual facilities, but MSU’s presence was not contained within one building. Once that larger relationship mattered to the story, aerial photography became important because it could make the collective presence visible.
Recognizing what mattered changed what the photography needed to show.
Sometimes the Story Is How the Project Is Used
At Tri County Elementary, student use was part of the photography plan from the beginning. The imagery would support an advertising campaign to school districts, making the experience of the completed learning environments particularly relevant.
The students were not there simply to occupy the classrooms or make the photographs feel active. They were using the spaces. That activity helped make the architecture easier to read by showing how the completed environment worked in use.
Because photography took place the week before the school opened, that activity had to be planned before production.
Test the Strongest Ideas
Finding something interesting about a project does not automatically make it the photographic story. A potential story should pass three tests before it begins shaping the photography.
Can the Project Support It?
Does the completed work actually demonstrate what you are proposing to communicate? An important idea may appear in a design narrative, project interview, or award submission without being evident in the finished work.
The story should not outrun the evidence.
Does It Matter?
Why is this important to the intended audience or communication purpose? Projects contain countless interesting details. They do not all deserve equal attention in the photographic record.
Can Photography Communicate It?
What would another person need to see to understand the idea?
Photography can communicate spatial relationships, context, scale, occupation, material character, visible technical integration, relationships between old and new, and the way architecture meets its site. Other important stories may depend on process, collaboration, historical information, technical data, or decisions that leave little visible evidence in the finished work.
Not every important project story is a photographic story. Writing, interviews, graphics, motion, or other media may be better suited to those stories.
If photography can carry the idea, finish the thought: For someone else to understand this, they need to see…
The answer begins to define the visual evidence the photography needs to preserve.
The purpose is not to write the photography plan yet. That comes next. This article is about knowing what the photography needs to preserve before that plan is made.
From Story to Brief
Once you know what the photography needs to preserve, those priorities still have to become decisions around visual evidence, project-team input, site conditions, access, people, timing, and production.
The next article in this series, The Briefing Structure, explores how to turn that understanding into photography requirements before production.
Continue to The Briefing Structure →
This article is part of the AEC Visual Strategy series, which examines how photography can be planned, produced, and managed as part of an AEC firm’s larger visual strategy.
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