Artist's Statement and Biography

I photograph architecture, statues, and other items providing strong geometry or texture. I photograph everything from Roman ruins to contemporary and modern structures, and abandoned factories, commercial signs and loft spaces. I have photographed in Rome, Prague, Paris, Brooklyn and Chicago. I print all my negatives and spend considerable time in the darkroom manipulating the final print.

Several of these photographs are featured in a book on architectural photography.

Rather than serve as conventional documentation of architecture, these prints render structures and statues as more abstract forms. Compression, unorthodox camera angles, varied film stocks and extreme printing techniques are used to isolate certain design elements. Verisimilitude is not the primary objective. Instead, I seek to reduce architecture to an expression of pure geometry.

Black and white photography is well suited to architecture because, by eliminating the distraction of color, it emphasizes form and structure, essential elements of architecture. It is particularly well suited to modern architecture with its reliance on rationalist geometry and monochromatic palettes.

I am drawn to the intricate textures found in architecture, especially when it starts to decay. Medium format photography is advantageous for such shots because of the high level of detail it captures on a negative. On several prints, I emphasize textures by combining two negatives into a composite print. This creates a transparency effect with textures from one negative layered over those from the second negative.

I am a self-taught fine-art photographer and have created medium-format monochrome images of architecture since 1994. I am influenced by my education in mathematics and geometry and photographers Eugene Atget, Margaret Bourke-White, Michael Kenna, and Judith Turner. I am a policy analyst with the United States Government and live in Washington, DC.

E-mail address: adam@hoffbergphoto.com