The Ballarat International Foto Biennale (BIFB13) will be in late August/early September this year. In the meantime BIFB have created a quarterly online photography magazine entitled Beta. Issue I has been published and it is a retrospective which features some of the shows we presented at BIFB’11 and BIFB’09.

One of the photographers included is the Australian-born and US-based architectural photographer Tim Griffith, who mostly photographs for clients the new buildings in South East Asia and the US with a modular 5x4 Alpa with a digital back tethered to a laptop.

“Architectural photography” still connotes a traditional client-driven practice straddling the architecture and publishing industries---the international architectural firms tap selected photographers to create photographs of their projects. The modernist style dominates---crystalline, weightless, with endless linear recession and crisp intersection of planes.

Griffith, in contrast, works in the space of architectural art photography. The photographs produced with a large format camera and high-resolution digital sensors are pristine and finely detailed and they are subsequently exposed to a series of processes to degrade the image.

These photos don’t look like architectural photography, not as thought of by the profession. The bird nest looks like a ruin in the Romantic tradition. This kind of photography is an interpretive medium for architecture.