Portrait of Iwan Baan

Dutch photographer Iwan Baan is known for telling the story of places. From October 2023, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein is dedicating its first major retrospective to the artist.

Iwan Baan, born in 1975, is a well-known photographer from the Netherlands. He is known for images that tell the story of life and interactions in architecture. His specialty is telling the story of a place, breaking with the tradition of showing architecture as something static and empty. Instead, his pictures show the use of a space. And not all of Baan’s photos show architecture with a well-known architect. He is also interested in informal and historical structures. On October 21, 2023, the first major retrospective dedicated to his work since the early 2000s will open at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany.

Baan grew up outside Amsterdam and studied photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. His love of photography dates back to the age of twelve, when he received his first photograph. After his studies, he followed his interest in documentary photography. After working in publishing and photography in New York and Europe, he focused on showing how individuals, communities and societies shape and interact with their built environment.

Although Baan has no formal training in architecture, his work shows a keen eye. Many of his images reflect the questions and perspectives of the individual in relation to architecture and space. With his artistic approach, Baan has given architecture an accessible voice that makes it easier to understand.

His work with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas in 2004 was an inspiration for Baan: Koolhaas is known for embracing the cultural life of a city when he designs a building there. This ideology soon became apparent in Baan’s photography, for example in pictures from Beijing: he developed a people-oriented aesthetic that relates to the rapidly growing and changing structures of the city, but also to life on the building sites and the workers.

Baan soon gained international recognition and expanded his client base. He traveled around the world to work on assignments while maintaining a studio in Amsterdam. Among others, he photographed the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI Museum in Rome and Thom Mayne’s Federal Building in San Francisco. In 2008, a London architecture school organized his first solo exhibition, which focused on photos from Beijing and a 3D technique developed by Baan.

Iwan Baan’s photography shows a passion for documentary and space. His images show man’s ability to re-appropriate available objects in order to find a home. His work on informal communities shows human ingenuity in the use of traditional architecture and the design of places. Iwan Baan received a Golden Lion for Best Installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 for his series of images of the Torre David settlement in Caracas.

Today, architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadi Architects, Toyo Ito and others want to work with Baan to give their works a sense of place and history. The Dutch photographer was the first recipient of the Julius Shulman Award for photography and was honored with the AIA Stephen A. Kliment Oculus Award. He has also contributed to several book projects. His work also appears on the pages of architecture, design and lifestyle publications, from the Wall Street Journal to Architectural Digest and the New York Times. Iwan Baan was named one of the 100 most influential people in contemporary architecture by Il Magazine dell’Architettura.

Iwan Baan’s photography always places buildings in a local cultural context. His interest in the diversity of people, places and spaces around the world is evident in his style. Baan cites Martin Parr and Mitch Epstein as photographers who have greatly inspired him. “I always want to tell the story of a place. To do that, I have to get to know the context. I have to be really present there, observe the rhythm of a space to understand the light, the people, the sounds and all the other particularities,” he explained in an interview in 2021.

On October 21, an exhibition entitled Iwan Baan. Moments of Architecture will open at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, paying tribute to Baan’s ability to tell the story of a place. The photographs show places such as the stone churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia, which have no known architect, as well as famous buildings. As Baan puts it, he is interested in what happens to a building once the architects have left it. This human focus makes him one of the greatest living architectural photographers.

An exhibition on the subject of “Garden Futures” is currently on show at the Vitra Design Museum.