Converging verticals

The oldest complaint in the genre

Point a camera up at a building and the walls lean in. Everyone who has photographed architecture has found this, usually on their first serious attempt at the work, and the response is almost always the same: a slight rotation of the camera back to level, the tops of the towers disappearing off the top of the frame, and a dawning recognition that you cannot get what you want from where you are standing. The problem is not technical failure. It is geometry — the same geometry that makes railway tracks appear to meet at the horizon, applied vertically instead of horizontally. Tilting the plane of the sensor toward a subject means that the near parts of that subject are closer than the far parts, and the frame scales accordingly. Parallel lines converge because they are at different distances, not because anything has gone wrong with the lens.

The question is not really how to eliminate converging verticals. It is whether eliminating them is the right ambition in the first place.

What the building actually looks like

The eye corrects for this constantly and unconsciously. Stand at the base of a tall building and look up and you see converging verticals — you simply do not register them as distortion because your brain integrates the physical experience of looking upward. The camera has no such integration. Whatever the sensor sees at the moment of exposure is fixed. This is why architectural photographs made with a camera held perfectly level — the optical axis parallel to the ground — read as honest in a way that corrected images sometimes do not, and also why they lose the top third of the building unless you are far enough back, or high enough, to include it without tilting.

The classical solution, still the one that works, is the view camera — a system where the lens standard and the film or sensor plane can be moved independently, allowing the photographer to shift the lens upward while keeping the back vertical. The view camera's movements, particularly the rise of the front standard, are what made architectural photography possible as a genre of precision. For most of the twentieth century, serious building photography was made this way: slowly, on large format film, with the camera on a tripod and the corrections made before the shutter opened. The results had a stillness and a geometrical severity that suited the subject.

Bill Brandt and Fay Godwin both worked extensively with buildings and landscape, and what is visible in the best of that tradition is not the absence of distortion so much as a careful decision about what kind of distortion to permit. Brandt's interiors in particular — work held by the Victoria and Albert Museum — use the compression and the drama of a very wide lens in tight spaces, which produces its own spatial strangeness, chosen rather than corrected. The lines are not always straight. But the picture knows what it is doing.

What you are actually deciding

The honest version of the problem is this: converging verticals are a record of the camera's position. If the camera was low and angled up, the picture says so. If it was level and centred, the picture says that instead. Neither is wrong; they are different statements about the same building. The difficulty is that the genre has a strong convention — the building rendered plumb and measured, as if the photograph were a document rather than a view — and photographs that depart from the convention tend to read as mistakes rather than choices, unless the departure is so decisive that it cannot be mistaken for an accident.

The wide angle pointed upward into a modernist tower is a different ambition from the corrected elevation made with a shift lens from a scaffold platform. Both are architecture photographs. What they cannot do is pretend to be each other. A half-corrected image — the camera tilted just enough to include the top of the building but not enough to make the angle feel intentional — is usually the worst outcome. It reads as a picture that wanted to be straight and was not.

Getting the elevation correctly requires either a higher camera position (which means access, scaffolding, a window in an opposite building, a request and often permission that takes longer to arrange than the photography) or a lens that can shift. Neither is free. The tripod position across the road where everything is level frequently does not exist because a bus stop, or parked vehicles, or a building in the way, occupies it. This is the real difficulty of the genre: not the optics but the logistics of standing in the right place. Cities are not arranged for photographers.

The building on its own terms

There is a third approach, less discussed, which is to read the building's geometry so carefully that the frame uses its lines deliberately rather than fighting them. A building with strong diagonals — the pitched roof of a market hall, the splayed wings of a civic building, the escarpment of a modernist car park — can be photographed from a low angle with the converging verticals turned into composition rather than complaint. The lines that converge become the lines that lead. The picture is not of a building that stands; it is of a building that rises, which is different information and sometimes truer to what the building intends.

This is not easier than any other approach. It requires more time with the building before the camera comes out — walking the perimeter, noticing where the geometry is strong, thinking about what time of day puts the light on the face that has the lines worth following. Ansel Adams described his process for landscape in terms of visualisation before exposure, and the idea translates almost exactly to built work: the photograph should be decided, as far as it can be, before you point the camera. Converging verticals that are chosen feel chosen. Ones that are discovered in the contact sheet feel found-and-accepted-reluctantly, and it shows.

The complaint about converging verticals is as old as the genre. Photographers have been worrying about the parallel lines of columns and towers since the nineteenth century. The worrying is not wrong, but it tends to focus on the lines as a problem to solve rather than as information about the relationship between camera and building. That relationship — where you stood, how far you tilted, what you were reaching for — is part of the photograph. Sometimes it is the best part.