A study of concrete, light and stairwells, shot on expired film across four continents since 2016.
Buildings hold
their breath.
I wait for it.
Selected work
Six commissions and personal studies, printed from negative and left largely untouched in post.
Shibuya, Tokyo
Concrete Choir
A week inside three brutalist housing blocks slated for demolition, photographed for the stairwells no one but residents ever see.
2024 — Personal study, Kodak Tri-X
Comporta, Portugal
Low Tide Modernism
Commissioned by a private client to document a 1968 coastal house before its first renovation in fifty years.
2023 — Private commission
Milan, Italy
Vertical Silence
Nine stairwells in nine postwar apartment buildings, each shot at the same hour of light to isolate the architecture from time.
2022 — Self-initiated, exhibited at Fondazione Cini
Warsaw, Poland
The Grid Remembers
A survey of prefabricated housing facades, commissioned for a museum retrospective on postwar Polish architecture.
2021 — Museum commission
Tucson, Arizona
Courtyard Logic
A study of how desert modernism uses shadow as a structural material, shot over three consecutive summer solstices.
2020 — Personal study
Berlin, Germany
Between Floors
Early work made while assisting on a restoration project — the first series that convinced me to shoot buildings full time.
2016 — Editorial, Baumeister Magazine
About
Eight years photographing buildings the way most people photograph the people inside them.
I don't shoot buildings when they're finished. I shoot them when they've settled — when the light has figured out where it lives.
Mara Voss trained as an architect before turning the camera on the profession she left. Her work sits between documentation and portraiture — treating stairwells, facades and courtyards with the same patience most photographers reserve for faces. Clients include museums, architecture studios and private collectors across Europe, Asia and North America.
Let's photograph
something that stands still.
[email protected]
Lisbon, Portugal
Available for travel worldwide
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