AlUla Airport
Photography of AlUla International Airport for the Royal Commission for AlUla, part of the same body of Saudi work as KAFD, NEOM and Dar Tantora in AlUla itself.
The airport is the first thing a visitor to AlUla sees, and it is doing a specific job: setting the register for a place whose entire proposition is landscape and heritage. The building and the art placed through it are one commission, not a building with decoration added, and the photography was scoped to treat them that way.
This is ground level work throughout. Airspace over an operating airport is not available to a drone, so nothing here is aerial, and the building had to be described from the positions any arriving passenger actually occupies: the approach, the drop-off, the hall, the walk out.
The terminal is a long horizontal in an empty landscape, which is the hardest kind of building to photograph flatteringly at midday. The elevation frames were held for the ends of the day, when the banding on the facade has enough relief to read and the desert behind has some tone in it rather than glare.
Several commissioned pieces are sited through the building, and each needed a different treatment. The steel calligraphic sculpture in the glazed hall only resolves when shot from directly beneath, looking up, where the letterforms separate against the sky instead of tangling against each other.
The stepped pavilion is the opposite problem. It is a saturated red in a landscape of pale stone, and it will blow out or turn orange at almost any hour except the two at the ends of the day, so those frames were scheduled around it rather than fitted in.
The stepped red pavilion is the piece that carries the arrival. Its stepped profile is drawn from the region's building language and its colour is not, and the tension between those two is the whole point of it.
It was photographed as architecture rather than as an object: from underneath, through its openings, and with the desert framed inside it, because the views out are as designed as the thing itself.
AlUla light is extreme and short. The usable window at each end of the day is narrow, the middle of the day is unusable for anything with relief in it, and the drive between locations eats into both ends.
That makes the scout the whole schedule. Knowing before the shoot day which face of the terminal takes the evening light, and which of the artworks needs morning, is the difference between covering the brief and covering half of it.
