Emma-Jane is an architect and photographer blending her passion for both to capture the beauty in architectural details, urban textures, and the play of light.

Instagram: @ejdd.photography

This photographic series documents three brutalist housing and civic projects across London and Paris: the Barbican Estate, Space House, and Les Choux de Créteil. Though geographically distinct, each building explores a similar architectural ambition;  to use repetition, mass, and concrete form to shape the buildings. 
 
Approaching these sites as both an architect and photographer, Dawson explores how these structures are experienced at human scale. Brutalist architecture is often photographed from a distance, framed as object or skyline. In this series, Dawson deliberately moves closer.

The images focus on edges, undercrofts, circulation spaces, and repeated elements; balconies, curves, columns where the architecture reveals its rhythm and texture.
 
At the Barbican, the camera lingers beneath walkways and along raised podiums, where light filters through concrete beams and columns. These spaces, often described as harsh or imposing, become quieter when observed closely. Shadow, proportion, and material begin to dominate, and the complexity of the estate reveals itself through movement and layering.
 
Space House, with its distinctive curved façade and modular repetition, is approached through both wide and compressed views. From below, the building’s stacked geometry reads almost as a sculptural system, while closer images flatten perspective and emphasise pattern. The repetition becomes less about scale and more about tempo, a visual rhythm created by identical elements responding to light and sky.
 
Les Choux de Créteil forms the emotional centre of the series. Its organic, petal-like balconies soften the weight of concrete, blurring the line between building and sculpture. By isolating fragments of the façade, the photographs shift attention away from the building’s overall form and toward its material presence, weathered surfaces, subtle colour variation, and the tension between softness and mass. These details invite a slower reading, encouraging the viewer to consider the beauty that concrete can behold.
 
Across all three sites, people are largely absent, yet the architecture remains deeply human. Signs of use; planting, wear, traces of daily life, are intentionally retained. Rather than documenting the buildings as pristine objects, this series acknowledge them as lived-in environments, shaped by time as much as by design.
 
This body of work is less about defining brutalism, more about spending time with it and discovering it.

By working between wide views and close details, Dawson suggests a way of viewing that values patience and restraint.

These buildings do not demand to be admired but wait to be noticed. 

PHOTOGRAPHY BY EMMA-JANE DAWSON