Hasselblad Masters

Volume 7: Enlighten

"I admire the thought, care, and effort architects put into designing a building so that it marries with its environment, and that is what I aim to show in my photography."

Many years ago, Voss started an unusual bucket list of places to visit. Unlike many bucket lists, it consisted specifically of buildings he desired to one day visit and photograph.

As a full-time architectural photographer, Albrecht Voss captures structures from every angle, from small facade details to grand overviews. But the architectural images closest to his heart are those that show how the building interacts with its surroundings, whether it's cars, people, or the very foundation it stands on.

"I took the X2D to some high peaks in the Alps. It had to perform under fog, rain, and freezing temperatures. It went with me on glaciers and through thunderstorms, and it never let me down."

To capture these unique moments where environment and structure interact, Voss began by searching for the right composition and where to set up his tripod. Then he waits. He looks for the right moment, whether it be a person walking by, a ray of light that forms a dynamic pattern, or the Milky Way rising above, to capture the perfect shot.

Voss’s Modern Alpine Architecture series, where he photographed nine modern buildings in Austria and Italy, won the Hasselblad Master Awards in Architecture in 2021. It was an undertaking three years in the making. "Just through my passion for photography, architecture, and the outdoors was I able to pursue this photo series for such a long time."

“Coming from a full-frame camera system, I always wondered what the ‘medium format look’ really meant. It is nothing you can experience on an Instagram feed. But when I opened the image files of the X2D for the first time, I was blown away by the amount of detail I captured."

The "Enlighten" series is an evolution from Voss's first images of alpine architecture. With "Enlighten", he wanted to showcase that a human footprint in nature doesn't always mean pollution or destruction. With sustainable construction and local materials, forms and colour pallets to build shelters, museums or chapels that blend into their surroundings.

Many of the buildings in Voss’s series use solar energy and on-site water purification to coexist with the beautiful and harsh alpine nature. This is Voss's vision for a more mindful future of tourism.

To highlight these pioneering concepts, Voss extracts the buildings out of the dark night with the help of artificial lighting. "I had a huge amount of freedom in post-production to recover shadows and highlights and to make expansive colour adjustments," Voss explains. "As my photo series is all about architecture at night, a good ISO performance was mandatory for me."

In the evening, Albrecht sets up his camera and composition and then waits for the sun to set. When the Milky Way is in the right spot, he starts a drone with an attached LED that circles around the buildings and lights them from above. While the drone flies its selected path, he shoots a few long exposures with the X2D to get the light from different angles, giving the buildings an ethereal glow. "The X2D was really up for a surprise here. Capturing images between ISO 3200 and 12800, I saw almost no degradation in image quality. Combined fast apertures of the lenses, I had a camera system that gave me a lot of flexibility in my shooting process."

For the “Enlighten” series, Voss only had ten days to photograph, and the most difficult buildings to reach were the Monte Rosa hut and Bivak pod Skuto, two of his long-time favourite locations. Albrecht and his assistant needed to overcome over a thousand metres of altitude in very rough conditions, navigating over steep rocks and traversing a glacier to reach their desired destinations. "The number one thing that brought me to the point where I am today is following my passion with great perseverance. I won the Hasselblad Masters with a photo series that I planned just for myself."

About Albrecht Voss

Albrecht Voss is a Hasselblad Master and full-time architecture photographer based out of Leipzig, Germany. His work celebrates built environments and images from his Modern Alpine Architecture Series won the 2021 Hasselblad Masters Award in Architecture. Voss has received recognition from the 2021 European Architectural Photography Prize, was nominated at the 2021 Fine Art Photography Awards, and has won the 2022 Drone Talent Award.