Iwan Baan

Iwan Baan photographs buildings — but the photographs are about the people in them, around them, not yet aware of them. His pictures of Koolhaas’s CCTV tower, Ando’s churches, Niemeyer’s late work read less like architectural documentation and more like single-frame cities, where the structure is one character among many.

He flies often. The work is global before it’s anything else: Lagos, La Paz, Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City — frequently from a helicopter, more often from a sidewalk. The images arrive everywhere architecture is published and have, between them, set the visual register of how contemporary buildings now look on paper.

He’s based in Amsterdam, works on assignment for the world’s working architects, and runs his own studio.