TV report – Photographer Iwan Baan

Reportage style for architectural photography

Manhattan during a power cut, photographed from a hired helicopter in the pitch-black night following Hurricane Sandy. A 45-storey, unfinished skyscraper in Caracas, where 750 families live in what is known as a ‘vertical slum’. The Beijing ‘Bird’s Nest’ before its completion, with construction workers gathered around an open fire in the foreground.

The images by Dutch photographer Iwan Baan rarely resemble classic architectural photography – and yet he is commissioned by the top tier of the architectural world: Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron. For Deutsche Welle’s euromaxx magazine, our film team visited Iwan Baan on 8 December 2013 at MARTa Herford – for the opening of his exhibition ‘52 Weeks, 52 Cities’, a photographic diary of a year spent travelling the world.

365 days, 52 cities and a helicopter over Manhattan

Iwan Baan’s way of life is a statement in itself: on the road 365 days a year, with no fixed abode since his Amsterdam flat burnt down in 2012, editing his photos on the plane. Where other architectural photographers turn up with a view camera, a tripod and an assistant, Baan makes do with two small cameras, no tripod, and natural light alone. “Rain can be beautiful too,” is his comment on weather conditions he refuses to be constrained by.

The images that established his reputation were mostly taken incidentally – the »Bird’s Nest« in 2005, when hardly anyone knew his name, and the Manhattan shot for New York Magazine, which he took from a helicopter paid for out of his own pocket on the night of the hurricane. The focus is not on buildings, but on people; Baan prefers to describe himself as a documentary photographer rather than an architectural photographer. For the MARTa exhibition, he spent a year travelling to 52 cities – from the Japanese Shinto shrine of Ise Jingu to the slums of Lagos.

MARTa director Roland Nachtigäller, the second interviewee in our feature, sums up Baan’s method in a single sentence, which the magazine has reproduced verbatim.

»Iwan Baan’s strength lies in the fact that he completely redefines the concept of architectural photography. He no longer looks at the iconic building, but at how we humans shape our living spaces.« – Roland Nachtigäller, Director of MARTa Herford

What our film team contributed

Telling the story of an exhibition through moving images is a technically demanding task: subdued gallery lighting, large-format prints, an artist engaging in conversation with visitors amidst his works. Stephanie Drescher has structured the piece around two interviews – with Baan himself and Nachtigäller as the curatorial voice – and incorporated visitors’ reactions in the form of vox pops.

Cameraman Uwe Schwarze captured the individual photographs as picture-in-picture shots without them losing any depth in the reproduction. The footage was supplemented by archive footage – including Baan’s helicopter flight over Manhattan at night and photos of the construction phases of the Beijing Olympic Stadium. Editing and colour grading were subsequently carried out at our Berlin AVID editing suite, along with music research and graphic animation – all from a single source.

We regularly produce artist and photographer portraits of this kind for DW euromaxx. You can find related articles on the Polish aerial photographer Kacper Kowalski and the Swiss glass artist Matteo Gonet. Find out more about our services under TV Production and Reports.

Iwan Baans’ own work can be found at iwan.com, whilst the exhibition is documented by MARTa Herford.