Iwan Baan

Iwan Baan (born Feb. 8, 1975, Alkmaar, Neth.) is a Dutch architectural photographer who used unexpected perspectives and the presence of people and movement to revive the traditionally static art of photographing structures.

Baan grew up outside Amsterdam. At the age of 12, he received his first camera, and he went on to study photography at The Hague’s Royal Academy of Art. He was attracted to digital photography but was initially uninterested in architecture as a subject, owing to the typically unlively style of such shots. By the late 1990s Baan was living in New York City and providing the images for art books and children’s books, having left the Academy of Art without graduating.

In 2004 Baan contacted the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas with an offer to help turn an exhibition of images produced by Koolhaas’s studio into an interactive Web site. Koolhaas was known for taking design inspiration from the cultural life of the cities where his buildings were constructed, and the influence of this ideology became apparent in Baan’s photography. Baan worked for the architect in such cities as Beijing, and his experience there played a key role in the development of his human-focused aesthetic. Beijing’s booming construction industry allowed him to document not only the city’s rising and changing structures but also the liveliness of their construction sites, which were occupied constantly by hundreds or even thousands of workers.

As Baan gained recognition for his ability to portray buildings in compelling and unusual ways, his client list expanded to include other architects as well as magazines and newspapers. He traveled around the world to work on commissions while keeping a base in Amsterdam, where he maintained a studio in which to develop his photographic techniques. Among the structures that he photographed were Thom Mayne’s Federal Building in San Francisco, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, U.A.E., and Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI museum in Rome.

Baan’s reputation as an artist in his own right was sealed in late 2008 when a London architectural school hosted his first solo exhibition. It focused heavily on his Beijing images and offered a showcase for a 3-D technique he had developed for photographing both finished buildings and scale models; his images of models were often effective in helping architects secure approval to build their designs. His stature was such that his photographs could enrich the reputations of the architects whose work he documented. In 2009 Baan’s images appeared in the books The SANAA Studios, on the Japanese architectural firm founded by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, and Porsche Museum, about the then newly built German museum. The following year he became the first recipient of the Julius Shulman Photography Award, named for the legendary architecture photographer.