Sebastian Schutyser Uses Pinhole Photography to Document the Work of Miró Rivera Architects

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One of the oldest photographic techniques, pinhole photography employs a simple camera, a light-tight box without a lens, but with a very small aperture, to re-create the camera obscura effect."

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In documenting the body of work of Miró Rivera Architects, Belgian photographer Sebastian Schutyser employs a photographic technique never before used for the presentation of contemporary architecture. The soft, pictorial imagery produced with a pinhole camera perfectly showcases the dialogue between architecture and landscape which underlines the studio’s designs.

One of the oldest photographic techniques, pinhole photography employs a simple camera, a light-tight box without a lens, but with a very small aperture, to re-create the camera obscura effect. Light from a scene passes through the aperture and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box, on the photographic paper. The particularity of the method is that it produces softer images than lens photography, with almost infinite depth of field and long exposures. As such, Schutyser luminous pinhole photographs depict architecture within a very particular atmosphere.

Drawn to the photographer’s approach as well as to his ability to capture the dialogue between natural and manmade, Miró Rivera Architects has commissioned Sebastian Schutyser to create a photographic essay for the studio’s monograph, titled Miró Rivera Architects: Building a New Arcadia. Schutyser has previously employed his method of “slow photography” to document mud mosques in Africa, remote hermitages in Spain, dolmens in South Korea, and adobe structures in the American Southwest. This photographic essay is, however, his first exploration of contemporary architecture using pinhole photography.