Timothy Soar Recent Work Review 2007 One Wood Street RIBA Exhibition Library Information			Tim Soar is one of Britain’s finest exponents of architectural photography. The images exhibited here marry that genre’s concern with the exploration of space and its habitation to the demands of portraiture. Before embarking on his In Practice series for the Architects’ Journal Soar studied the extensive portrait collection held in the RIBA British Architectural Library Photographs Collection. Here he would have discovered the history of portrait photography in microcosm. During the 19thC, thanks largely to the long exposures required, architectural portraiture was characterized by its stiff formality with the sitters often pictured against florid backdrops. Unlike in painted portraits, there was little indication of the subjects’ profession. At the turn of the 20thC developments in camera technology made it possible to capture architects going naturally about their work. Even so relatively few such images survive. Still rarer are portrayals of architects in their offices. The formal portrait continued to predominate metamorphosing into today’s obsession with celebrity, ‘lifestyle’ images. An interesting exception, and one that prefigures Soar’s work, is Architecture and Building’s Team in the Office series of 1955-56 which featured John McCann’s black-and-white photographs illustrating the working practices of leading contemporary firms. Comparisons with Soar’s series are instructive with the scarcity of women and the omnipresent drawing board representing the most obvious differences while perhaps more surprising is the similar stress on a non-hierarchical office structure and the importance of teamwork - themes that emerge strongly from Soar’s photographs. These are not fly-on-the-wall but, reflecting Soar’s intuitive eye, beautifully lit, carefully composed images that encompass both the medium’s innate promiscuity with its relish for incidentals (Ian Simpson Architects) and its more architectonic elements where the subjects set deep in the frame are glimpsed Vermeer-like through a sequence of artfully crafted spaces (Francis Weal & Partners). The photographs fascinatingly reveal not only how the architects themselves have chosen to have their practice ethos represented but also the variety of practice types, the multiplicity of tasks the architect undertakes, and above all the disparate settings which they have created from which to draw inspiration. Soar’s photographs are thus an illuminating fusion of conventional portraiture where the subjects predominate and today’s Guardian features on writers’ rooms from which the protagonists are noticeably absent. This makes them a unique and outstanding chronicle of architectural practice at the beginning of the 21stC. Robert Elwall. Assistant Director, Photographs, Imaging and Digital Development, British Architectural Library. Read Jonathan Glancey's review of Architects in Practice in The Guardian > The full set of portraits on Valency >