One of the core exhibitions at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale was called Immediate Future by Tim Griffith. He is a foremost architectural commercial photographer whose parallel art practice comments on the disquiet about the present states of both architecture and photography.

The disquiet in architectural photography refers to the fact that the majority of commercial architectural photography is commissioned by developers with a vested interest in portraying the built form in a good light, and so the images are cleaned up by photographers to produce the sleek, manipulated, politicized images made for commercial or marketing purposes. It has been like this for zonks.

On the other hand, we have the constructed architecture photography in the fine art world where the architecture itself --ie., the built form--- is of much less importance than the artist making use of it as their subject.

Both kinds of architectural photography take us a long way from the truth ethos of photojournalism (the concept of photography as a “documentary piece of evidence) that is opposed to digital manipulation, which is seen as akin to fakery. This ethos has limits as it does not apply to architectural photography.

As Tim Griffith points out in the blurb to his Immediate Future exhibition:

With the recent rise in popularity of architecture around the world , many new buildings, especially those in the public domain, have been pressed into the service of focal and national authorities as drawcards for political and financial gain. A building in this service no longer has the opportunity to gracefully embed itself into the general consciousness of the society that surrounds it. It can no longer wait to be cherished. It must be loved now.