Introduction to Urban Photography By Pablo Casals Aguirre

The camera does not make the photographer; the important thing to achieve good photographs is the look, the process, the perseverance, the proof and the error, until the magic appears. Pablo Casals Aguirre – an architect by profession – is a self-taught Chilean photographer, and has spent more than nine years dedicated to architectural registration. He currently has more than one hundred works registered from around the world and his work has appeared in publications such as Dwell, C3, Domus or ArchDaily.

In this course you will learn to build your eyes and use the city as a laboratory, applying the methodology of Pablo’s work to create a photographic series on the streets of your city or a specific building.

About this course

You will start the course knowing Pablo Casals, who will tell you how photography was present in his life since he was a child, and how his career in architecture filled him with tools to develop projects. In addition, you will know their main influences and references.

Pablo will introduce you to photography through obsession as a way to the final work. He will present his work methodology, how he approaches a project and how he develops his own language. You will see the teams that you usually work with and what your process is before going out to take pictures: think and plan!

To learn about urban photography you have to go out with a plan. Therefore, Pablo will take to the streets of Santiago de Chile based on his previous planning, to teach you by example, how you should do it, or to discover your case study, in this case, a building.

You will try to frame, manipulate the camera, take photographs in favor of light and the sun’s path, all through the practical example of Pablo, looking for that magic between technique and intuition.

Then, you will go to postproduction. You will learn to visualize, classify and organize the material, and then choose 18 photographs that are coherent with the language proposed and pass them to editing.

Finally, Pablo will show you the whole process of printing digital photographs to print your photographic series and make some final considerations about it.

You will develop a photographic series where you will expose a theme and print your favorite photos in a larger format.