Monumental Photos is an emerging architecture photography collective. We’re bringing together photographers who treat buildings as records worth keeping, and offering their work as prints.
About the Founder
Every Chicagoan eventually becomes an architecture photographer. Dale Cruse was born in Gary, Indiana, just down the lakeshore, close enough to catch it.
It all started with LEGO, which taught him that a building is a stack of decisions. On drives into the city, past the steel mills, he’d press his face to the car window and marvel at the real thing, cornice by cornice.
He started his career as a U.S. Army photojournalist. In Bosnia and Croatia in 1995-96, he turned his camera on buildings the war had torn open. A shelled facade holds two things at once: the record of what happened and the evidence of what stood there before. Sarajevo’s architects had just coined a word for it: warchitecture.
Thirty years on, he trains that eye on San Francisco, where he lives in a 1910 Victorian in the Bayview. Now he’s launching Monumental Photos, an architecture photography collective. A building doesn’t have to be famous to be monumental.
His work has been published by the American Institute of Architects, Archinect, Hoodline, Le Monde, and New York Magazine, used by San Francisco Heritage and Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West, and viewed more than 12 million times on Flickr. He’s a member of American Photographic Artists and a lifetime member of the National Press Photographers Association.