Andrés Gallardo Albajar is a self-taught Spanish photographer who documents notable buildings in tightly cropped, geometric compositions that often verge on abstraction.,,The son of two architects, he took up photography only after his 30th birthday and has since developed Urban Geometry, an ongoing survey of built environments from Alicante to Seoul.
Gallardo Albajar grew up in Spain surrounded by architecture books, magazines, and construction sites, the son of two architects. Trained in advertising and graphic design, he was working as a copywriter and marketing manager when he received a digital SLR camera as a gift for his 30th birthday and began photographing buildings he encountered while traveling.,In 2018 a magazine invited him to Seoul for an exhibition, a workshop, and a shoot, and he left his office job to pursue photography full time,producing that year the personal project Korean Schooling, photographed at schools in Seoul and Busan.That February he also traveled to the Great Wall of China, where thick fog left the usually crowded site deserted, giving his photographs what he called “a more surreal and magic feeling”.
Urban Geometry, his ongoing project, documents architecture from Alicante to Seoul in tightly cropped, symmetrical compositions shot against consistently blue skies, including buildings by Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry. The photographs occasionally let in signs of life, plants or CCTV cameras breaking across an otherwise carefully constructed frame, and a selection was published as a book by Hoxton Mini Press.He has also contributed to “Aurora”, a collaboration between the digital art groups The Luminarium and Cosmosys Collective, with works including AVIÓN and TOBOGÁN,and to Cosmosys Collective's “XI - Selfportrait” exhibition with the piece RECKONING.In 2023 he placed third in the Architecture and Design category of the Sony World Photography Awards.
