Want to create stunning urban landscape photography? In this blog we teach you the tips, techniques and secrets great urban photographers use. Transform your photographs into powerful narratives by following this guide to great urban landscape photography.

What is urban landscape photography?

Urban landscape photography, quite literally, is the art of photographing urban environments. Humans have drastically altered the natural world, creating urban landscapes filled with towering skyscrapers and hidden alleyways. Urban landscape photography captures the essence of urban life, from its bustling energy to its captivating architecture. Urban landscape photography is about understanding the language of the city and translating that to an image that can communicate a story, idea or feeling.

Urban landscapes have been explored by photographers since the days of Daguerre, and then later ‘New Topographics’, a movement from the 1970s focusing on man-altered landscapes and urban environments.

Urban landscape photography is inexplicably linked to architecture – it’s important to understand how buildings form unnatural landscapes, and by proxy, the consequence of human civilisation on the planet and the individual human experience within these urban environments.

According to The World Bank, globally around 56% of the world’s population resides in cities – that’s around 4.4 billion people! This makes it quite likely that you’ve taken a photo in an urban area. A corner of a skyscraper where the light hits it just right or a beautiful shot of the sun setting on a wider cityscape all make good photos; But how do you make it more than that – how do you make your urban landscape photography great?

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Urban landscape photography through a critical lens.

Looking at the work of famous urban landscape photographers such as Stephen Shore, Andreas Gursky and Nadav Kandar it’s impossible to ignore the stark realities of the consequence of the rapid growth and development of human civilisation. It’s those powerful ideas drawn from these images that make them so compelling.

The real magic of urban landscape photography is found not in the artist’s technical proficiency, but what questions it raises and the ideas and stories it communicates. If you’re looking to say more about your urban landscape photography, it’s good to brush up on Roland Barthes’ theory on the semiotics of photography.

Plainly put, there are four main ideas to understand when adding meaning into your images.

Denotation – What you see in an image.

Connotation – The meaning attached to what you see.

Coded Iconic – The story that the image portrays. Using context, the “reader” of the image will be able to understand the wider meaning of the image as a whole.

Noncoded Iconic – Literal denotation of the image, i.e The image has no further meaning than what it is.

Learn how to capture Cities at Night here

To give you some idea of how to incorporate these into your own urban landscape photography, here’s some critical analysis which goes into how the work of some famous urban landscape photographers can be explored further than face value. Once you’re able to identify these signifiers in their work, you’ll be able to start thinking critically about the urban landscape photography that you’re capturing.

Charles Marville:

A group of people standing in a ruined city — Construction of the avenure de l’Opera: The Butte des Moulins, 1876, ©*Charles Marville*

Known as the photographer of Paris, Marville is renowned for his immortalisation of Parisian streets as the city changed under Emperor Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s urban planning initiatives. His work served to document and preserve the architectural heritage of Paris before significant changes and spotlights ideas of gentrification and the consequences of the rapid modernisation on the fringe of the city.

In his image “Construction of the avenure de l’Opera: The Butte des Moulins (from the rue Saint-Roch, December 1876) Marville has captured a scene of apparent destruction. Mounds of debris and skeletons of buildings create the scene, much like the aftermath of a war. Before the mid 1870s, this was a working-class neighbourhood that was dominated by small trades, until it was cleared to make way for, what would become known as the most glamourous street in Paris, the avenue de l’Opera. This example of urban landscape photography can be taken as a comment on gentrification – the rapid and destructive development of “old” Paris, uprooting an entire community of working class in favour for the Opera – entertainment for the affluent.

Sze Tsung Leong:

A city with many buildings and a hole in the ground — Yihao Qiao, Yuzhong District, Chongqing, 2002, ©*Tze Tsung Leong*

A creator of powerful panoramic urban landscape photography of cities, Sze Tsung Leong’s work shows their all-encompassing scale. In his History Images, he demonstrates the erasure of history and manipulation of urban landscapes for politics, by ways of rapid new development, and how these developments reshaped Chinese society in particular.

He states that his series documents the “erasure of parts of the city that don’t necessarily fit within the present system” as the Chinese government wiped away buildings that reference their imperial and socialist history. Sze Tsung Leong has used composition to really emphasise the idea of “smash the old world, build the new world,” from the cultural revolution in China in the 60s and 70s, by composing the images with the destruction of the older buildings with the newer urban development towering over in the background, showing the next stage over the “in-between” stage of the development of the urban landscape. The image “Yihao Qiao, Yuzhong District, Chongqing, 2002” from his series, shows this as it captures the point after the traditional structures had been demolished, the ground clear for the next phase of new development.

Michael Wolf:

Hong Kong High Rises — a57, ©*Michael Wolf*

In his urban landscape photography, Michael Wolf uses patterns to convey the overwhelming scale of the megastructures in cities across the globe, capturing the most population-dense cities in the world. The series could liken human civilisation to a beehive – like its intricate architecture built to house the colony and how post-industrialism has affected the way people live and the way humans could design cities in the future. His images, particularly of the Hong Kong high rises, would not be out of place in a depiction of a science-fiction mega-city. The use of lines and pattern really exhibit the brutalist structures in a way that’s overwhelming and all-encompassing. “The focus of the German photographer michael wolf’s work is life in mega cities. Many of his projects document the architecture and the vernacular culture of metropolises.”

His image “a57” from Architecture of Density shows the dense architecture of Hong Kong in a way that tricks the eye as it gives you no reference of how big or where the buildings are. The crop of image includes no sky or ground, giving the illusion that the buildings are never ending, suggesting there is no beginning and no ending to this way of living – it only is.

Nadav Kandar

A cityscape with a river and a bridge — Chongqing II, Chongquing Municipality, 2006, ©*Nadav Kandar*

Kandar’s urban landscape photography captures the shadow of humanity in landscape. He typically avoids the inner bustle of the city and yet prefers to focus his lens on the edges and the peripheries. Some of his most notable work, Yangtze, The Long River, was inspired by the constant change that China underwent as it tore down its infrastructure in the early 2000s for new development and the importance of the river to the people that lived there. He was also influenced by painters of the sublime, Constable and Turner and would capture “small against the might of China” and to demonstrate the apparent “existing over living” that the migrant workers struggled with and the “ruthlessness of man as a whole”.

An example of how Kandar does this in his urban landscape photography is in the image Chongqing II, Chongquing Municipality, 2006. He uses the idea of the sublime, usually used by classical painters such as Constable to juxtapose one side of the Yanzhe river in comparison to the other highlighting the rapid development of the aera. He also used this framing to in tandem with the shadows cast on the people in the scene – alluding to the consequences of the development to the people living in the shadow of this development along the river.

Gregory Crewdson

A parking lot with a building and trees — Redemption Center, ©*Gregory Crewdson*

Unlike some of the other artists we’ve mentioned previously in this blog, Gregory Crewdson uses the urban landscape setting to tell very intimate human stories, portrayed in scenes that would not be out of place in a movie from the eighties. The images tap into a melancholy of the human experience and highlight these in a cinematically. Crewdson uses the urban setting as a storytelling device. Each scene in his series’ is meticulously planned and staged to create the overarching story and uses a whole array of visual clues within the urban landscape to do this.

In his image “Redemption Centre” he uses visual clues to allude to human stories and then a deeper message on connection and disconnection. The man closest to the camera in the frame stands in a dilapidated carpark. He stares at a puddle strewn with rose petals and the two teenagers in the background are seemingly sorting cans at the back of a breeze-block building that reads “Redemption Centre”. Through this manipulation of aspects of this urban setting, Crewdson has alluded to multiple stories about these individuals and the location itself within the scene.

But how do you create urban landscape photography like these?

Know the landscape.

Research into the history of the city, its context, it’s people and the stories surrounding it. It’s not just great technical attributes that make a great image, it’s the meaning behind it and message you want to put across.

Have a point of focus.

Pick something about the location that interests you and makes you feel something, then challenge yourself to communicate that through image. It doesn’t have to be a grand statement, just something that can resonates with you and others. This will help focus your urban landscape photography.

Plan your photography.

Much like when you capture the natural landscape, you should plan your urban landscape photography. Take time to consider the time of day, the weather and how busy certain areas are during the day – think about what these elements could say about your scene.

Learn about planning landscape photography here.

Experiment with composition.

Composition is integral to communicating a message. Urban landscapes are full of geometric shapes, patterns, and lines that can help you compose your shots and clearly communicate your message. You can use leading lines, such as roads, bridges, railways, or fences, to draw the viewer’s eye into the scene and towards the main subject and your theme.

Learn about composition in our beginner’s course.

Change your perspective.

One of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your urban landscape photography is to change your perspective. Don’t just shoot from eye level or from the same spot. Try different angles, heights, and distances. Look up, look down, all around. You can also use a drone, a ladder, a rooftop, a bridge, or a window to get a different view of the urban landscape. Consider what a different perspective does to the message in your image – does it give an overwhelming sense of scale? Is it demonstrating the juxtaposition to nature? Is it making the urban landscape look like something else?

Take your time.

Unlike the fast, in the moment pace of Street Photography, which is very dynamic – Urban landscape photography is more static. You can take your time to wait for the moment that you want. The sun in the right place, backlighting a certain building, or even a long exposure with a low aperture to capture every detail of the scene.

Go abstract

Urban landscape photography doesn’t have to be realistic or literal. You can also go abstract and create images that focus on the shapes, colours, textures, and forms of the urban environment. You can use a zoom lens, a macro lens, or a tilt-shift lens to isolate and magnify certain details or elements. You can also use different lenses or a prism to distort and bend the reality as well as reflections, shadows, or light trails to create interesting and surreal effects.

Learn how to create light trail photography here.

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Conclusion:

Urban landscape photography is complex and rewarding genre that allows you to explore and capture the beauty and complexity of the human-made environment and the stories within. By finding and expressing your own vision, you can create stunning urban landscape photography that showcase not only your skills and style, but also use it as an opportunity to say something greater about yourself and the world around you. We hope you enjoyed this blog post and learned something new. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to leave them below. And don’t forget to share your urban landscape photos with us and the rest of the community.

Happy shooting!

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Urban Landscape Photography - More Than Just a Cityscape