Photography and the Built Environment
with Mark Shiel and Alice Clancy
Tickets: €25 - prebook via Eventbrite
A one-day workshop, guided by two conveners, in which participants make, reflect on, and discuss architectural photographs of selected buildings in Galway city centre.
Architectural photography is a key medium in disseminating knowledge and ideas about our built environment. Focusing attention on selected still images of buildings in place and time, it heightens our understanding of their visible aspects while bringing invisible details and processes to light, making the unseen seen. Architectural photography is also a professional and commercial technique used to visualise buildings according to a brief for a client (architect, developer, or property owner). Bearing in mind this tension between art and function, this workshop provides specialists and non-specialists alike an opportunity to explore and reflect on architectural photography, using Galway city centre as a studio. Guided by the conveners and working in small groups, participants will take photographs of selected buildings and locations that they will then edit, present, and discuss, expanding their technical ability and their understanding of the principals involved.
Co-conveners
Alice Clancy is engaged in a multi-disciplinary practice involving architectural education, curation and photography. Her work, often collaborative, explores how the built environment shapes and is shaped by social and environmental contexts. She has held notable curatorial roles at La Biennale Architettura in Venice, her photography has been widely published, and she has provided academic leadership at UCD Architecture with a focus on climate literate, inclusive pedagogy.
Mark Shiel is Professor of Film, Media, and Urban Studies at King’s College London, where he teaches filmmaking and photography of the built environment. His most recent film is the 30-minute documentary Madingley (2024), about the architecture of war memorials. He has also published five books and numerous essays, most recently “Ed Ruscha’s Street Photos and the Cinematic Sequence Shot”, in Ed Ruscha’s Streets of LA (Getty Research Institute, 2025).