Iñaki Hernández-Lasa FRPS FIPF AFIAP is one of only seven people in Ireland who has obtained Fellowships of both the Royal Photographic Society (FRPS) and the Irish Photographic Federation (FIPF). His two fellowships were both obtained with panels of architectural images. In a Zoom presentation from Limerick Iñaki treated us to a confident, informative and delightful insight into his approach to architecture photography. Using primarily his 20/21 image panels for his Fellowship awards he demonstrated what he refers to as “moving from representation to interpretation”.
The Irish panel was mainly based on the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles designed by Frank Gehry. Clad in glass, titanium, and limestone it has a similar chromatic characteristic to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao also designed by Gehry and with which Iñaki has a special affinity. The Reichstag in Berlin is also featured. His approach is to use the intimate detail of the architecture in a minimalist way to display his interpretation. The images consist of distinct parts of the buildings with verticals, shapes and different light effects displayed to great effect in a consistent canvas of blue, green and ochre colours. Diagonals produce leading lines not just to take the viewer through the image but between images across the panel.
A similar approach was used for the RPS panel, but the blues and greens were replaced with more muted colours of cream, ochre, grey and white. Who would have thought that the junction a wall, column and ceiling could be so photogenic? The images individually were abstracts of geometric shapes, diagonals and curves all linked together by the leading lines. Iñaki sought to make them reflect the genius loci, the spirit of the place. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao was the subject, and the challenge was to create something different to represent this iconic building.
Iñaki is a self-professed perfectionist. He rejects the machine gun approach to photography that can produce 5000 images in a day’s shoot for one where the images are conceptualised in advance and the shots lined up in camera and only when he is entirely satisfied does he press the shutter release. 150 images in a 15 hours shoot is his norm. He illustrated his approach with a number of different buildings from the US, London and Spain and emphasised that he likes to provide dimensionality by including a figure where appropriate, but he makes sure that the figure is in the right place and does not break any other lines or features in the image. In one instance in Milwaukee he captured quite by chance a man on his knees proposing to his girlfriend. Through a radio appeal he located the couple and presented them with the image as a gift.
His website www.ihlphotography.com is well worth a visit and a video interview on the distinctions page will provide a reminder of this outstanding presentation.