London: Finding Caroline Walker in Concrete

Exploring London’s architecture with the University of Arts London (UAL)

I just completed a short course called “Photography with Art & Architecture” at the University of Arts London. The premise: one week of architectural photography in brutalist landmarks like the Barbican and National Theatre—I was instantly sold.

Architecture photography can be boring and austere: straight lines, repetitive angles, clinical compositions that are geometrically perfect but emotionally void. My objective that week was to inject poetry into those raw concrete structures—something more delicate and intimate, but also honest about the vertigo and claustrophobia these spaces can evoke.

Looking back at the portfolio, I noticed a recurring thread: the quiet presence of female figures in the background, like touches of fragility against those monumental walls.

It then struck me how some of these images echo the work of Caroline Walker, my favorite contemporary painter. Walker portrays the everyday lives of ordinary women—in nail salons, as nurses, as hairdressers—always from an outsider’s perspective, glimpsed through windows, like a voyeur of female mundanity.

It’s that same paradox of distance and proximity that I found myself drawn to.

Written and photographed by Alexandra van der Essen