Architecture Photography with Angie McMonigal

Angie McMonigal photographs buildings by walking towards them rather than away from them!

Her work is almost entirely details, fragments and abstractions. A few inches of a facade. A curve caught against a grid. A piece of a building that tells you very little about its shape and a great deal about what it is like to stand underneath it. It has taken her from Chicago to Paris and into National Geographic, the New York Times and Architectural Digest along the way.

This is a complete workshop series, over four Wednesday evenings. It begins with standing in front of a building with no idea where to start, moves through composing it and then editing it, and finishes with an evening spent on pictures made by the people who came. Nothing is assumed, and you do not need to have seen Angie before.

You do not need a city full of skyscrapers. Almost everything here works on a car park, a supermarket roof or a bus shelter, which is the point!

The four sessions

Part 1, Wednesday 28 October Concept to Capture

Where a picture starts, which is usually before you arrive. Choosing a location, researching the architect, and what Angie looks for in a Google image search so she knows what is there before she gets out of the car.

Then on location. Scouting the building rather than shooting it straight away. Deliberately taking less equipment. Staying long enough to see it properly. Picking one compositional idea and sticking to it, because, as she puts it via Orson Welles, the enemy of art is the absence of limitations and going back, repeatedly, because the building is a different picture in different light.

She will take apart the tools she uses over and over: isolation, viewpoint, pattern, negative space against filling the frame, high key and low key, working reflections and layers into a frame and pareidolia, which is the business of seeing a face in a facade and using it. Including Alexander Calder's Flamingo in Chicago, which is where this series started for me!

Part 2, Wednesday 18 November Chaos and Order: Finding Balance Through Composition

What to leave out. This is the session about busy scenes and how to find the clean picture that is sitting inside one.

Three buildings, worked properly rather than glanced at. The Fulton Center in New York, the US Embassy in London, and the Louvre in Paris, including the Carrousel underneath it. Each one gets taken apart: leading lines, layers, triangles, symmetry and deliberate asymmetry, centring against the rule of thirds, simplifying, and contrasts of every kind, curves against angles, shadow against light, old against new, warm against cool.

If you have ever stood somewhere visually noisy and known there was a photograph in there somewhere without being able to find it, this is the one.

It also answers something Danelle asked Angie the last time she was with us, which was whether the approach changes for older and more ornate buildings, because the mindset surely has to be different. The Louvre and the Carrousel are precisely that question, and this is where she takes it apart.

Part 3, Wednesday 16 December Editing

The edit. Angie warned me this session would be boring. I did not believe her, so I asked for some before and after files, and she sent them.

They are not what I expected, and they are more interesting for it. Very little of what she does is sliders. What actually changes a picture is the crop, decided long after the shutter, and the decision about whether a photograph is a colour photograph or a black and white one. She quotes Elliott Erwitt on this: colour is descriptive, black and white is interpretive. You will watch a wide, flat, slightly grey frame become a square with real weight in it, and then watch the same file become something else again in black and white.

Plus the part she does spend real time on, which is cleaning up. Cloning from one side of a building to the other, mirroring where a structure is not quite symmetrical, and dealing with dirty, cracked and weathered surfaces, which is most buildings most of the time.

Watching somebody work on a real picture is the part people consistently say they learn most from, and it is why I pushed for this one.

Part 4, Wednesday 13 January 2027 Sharing & Celebration

Your pictures, on the screen, with Angie working through them.

This is not a critique session. It is a teaching hour that happens to use our photographs instead of hers and it is worth coming to even if you never send anything in.

We will open a sharing page from the very first session. Send things in as you go. If there is a spare ten minutes in any of the other evenings, we will put one up then too!

Who this is for

Anyone who likes buildings, and anyone who does not yet know they do.

• If you have never photographed architecture, start at part one. Nothing assumes prior knowledge, and the first session is built to make everything after it make sense.

• If you already shoot buildings, this is a course in restraint. It is easy to keep adding technique. Angie works the other way, by taking things out of the frame, and part two in particular is an hour of watching somebody decide what not to photograph.

What people said the last time Angie presented for us

• No tripod. No lighting. Minimal post-processing. This is all music to my ears!! Fliss

• This is SO interesting! I am going to have to go into some cities and LOOK for images. Danelle

• Stunning images, generously shared. Richard

• I love your work, Angie. Thanks for sharing it and your thought processes with us. Linda

• Fabulous presentation, inspiring. Love your attitude to your craft. Marnie

That evening we had people with us from Miami and the Catskills, from Rhode Island, Monterey and New Mexico, from Switzerland and Ireland, from the Black Isle and the East Neuk of Fife, from Canterbury, Newcastle and Newtownards, from Wellington in New Zealand, and from Geelong in Australia, where it was six in the morning!

What you will need

A camera, and a building. That really is it.

Angie will show her own setup, and I want to say clearly in advance that you need none of it. She shoots a Sony a7R IV with tilt-shift lenses, which is the sort of list that makes people think the session is not for them. It is. Fliss put it better than I can, watching Angie the last time: no tripod, no lighting, minimal post-processing. Everything she teaches about seeing works on any camera, and a good deal of it works on a phone. What is worth writing down is her settings approach, which is simple and portable: aperture priority, the lowest ISO the light allows, and expose for the highlights.

For part three, any editing software you already use. She works in Lightroom and Photoshop, but the thinking is the same wherever you edit.

About Angie

Angie McMonigal is a fine art and commercial architecture photographer based in Chicago. She came to it from the micro sciences, having trained in molecular biology and virology, which may explain why she looks so closely at things.

She made the photographs for the fourth edition of A View From the River, published by the Chicago Architecture Center this June, and her work has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Architectural Digest. She runs small architecture workshops around the world, in Chicago, Paris, New York, Mexico City and Miami, limited to ten people and they sell out.

From Mark

Last summer I stood in front of Alexander Calder's Flamingo in Chicago with Angie. I was doing what I always do, backing away and trying to fit the whole sculpture into the frame. Angie suggested I stop trying to photograph all of it and look at a few inches of it instead, and she mentioned in passing that the same spot would be a different picture entirely six hours later.

I had never thought about a sculpture, or a building, that way. The frames I brought home from that afternoon are some of my favourites, and I have been looking for the closer detail ever since. One sentence, given quietly as a suggestion rather than a correction, and it changed how I photograph. That is the whole reason I wanted her back for something longer.

She came along to our Chicago meet up and spent the day with us, giving her time to everybody there rather than only to the people who already knew her work. I am not the only one it stuck with. Renee, who was on that meet up, wrote to me afterwards to say that since Chicago she had become more and more interested in photographing architecture.

What I like about her teaching is that it is about noticing rather than about equipment. She sees things the rest of us walk past, and she can explain how, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.

I will admit I had to talk her into part three. She told me her editing was boring and straightforward and that nobody would want to watch it. I have run enough editing sessions to know that watching another person work is consistently the thing people enjoy most, and having now seen her before and after files, I am more certain than ever. There is a moment in one of them where a flat grey frame becomes a photograph purely through a crop, and I want everyone to see it.

Tickets

£24 for the four live sessions, with the recordings on the website within 24 hours and access for four weeks.

£34 for the four sessions and Angie's slides from parts one and two. These are her full decks, properly built, one of them over forty slides taking you through a global tour of buildings with the technique named on every frame. They work as a reference long after the evening has finished. There are no slides for parts three and four, because those sessions are Angie working on screen rather than presenting.

£43 for the four sessions, the slides, and twelve months to watch the recordings instead of four weeks.

This option exists because people kept asking for it. This series in particular is one you may want to come back to. You will watch part one in October, and then in May you will find yourself standing in front of a building somewhere with good light on it, wanting to remember what Angie said about scouting. Part three is a live edit which is exactly the kind of thing you want to rewatch after you have gone out. Four weeks is rarely long enough for that to happen.

Rachael, at the end of the last evening with Angie: I will enjoy watching the recording again. This is the tier for exactly that!

If you find this after the series has started, book anyway. You get every remaining session plus the recordings of anything already run.