Architectural photographer since 1999

My name is Jesús Granada. I have been photographing architecture for more than 25 years. Since then I have worked in more than thirty countries under commission from architects and editorial publishers who needed to document their work. I have worked for El Croquis, Taschen, Domus, Architectural Review and many other international publishers.

I trained as an architect at the University of Seville. I began photographing with a Sinar 4×5 large-format camera on slide film: a camera obscura, where the slow rhythm of the inverted viewfinder teaches you to wait for the light and to think before pressing the shutter. My eye was shaped by that double discipline of the architect’s intent and the slowness of the photographic act. The method remains the same: reading a building through the ideas, the world and the decisions of the architect who conceived it.

I live in Andalusia, in Seville, in southern Spain, and from here I cover commissions across Europe, the Americas and Asia. I work with established studios and with architects who are defining their voice. I photograph a wide range of architectural typologies: housing, public facilities, museums, heritage rehabilitation and ephemeral projects. The way of working is always guided by the basic principle of finding the context, construction and ideas that compose the project.

Studios and publications

I have photographed projects by hundreds of studios whose work appears regularly in publications of reference. My work appears in international publishers, but my collaboration with El Croquis is of a different nature: I have worked with them as their photographer since 2018, with thirty monographs completed and more than two hundred reportages accumulated. It is the most sustained and demanding relationship of my editorial career, given the significance and value of El Croquis in the history of the architecture of our time.

My active archive: over 1,200 projects

I maintain an organised, accessible archive of more than 1,200 photographed projects. It is built around ideas, places, typologies, intentions and architectural concepts. Well processed, this archive makes it possible to draw connections between works, concepts and moments that remain hidden to researchers and writers.

Among more than 38,000 photographs, if a magazine or a curator is looking for a specific building —or a concept, or an atmosphere— I have it located and ready for editorial delivery instantly. Understanding the world through the particularity of each project: that is the added value I try to share from the archive.

Visibility and editorial reach worldwide

My archive seen from outside: the editorial judgement of hundreds of writers and researchers who chose to feature the work of an architect I had photographed. More than three hundred publishers across much of the world have incorporated into the critical flow of contemporary architecture projects photographed by me.

For the architects I work with, this is the proof that a reportage functions beyond the image itself: it becomes visible, circulates, is cited, is referenced in bibliographies, is reprinted and is named even years later.

Here is a selection of international covers that once used my work and highlighted the architects I had the good fortune to work for: