Lara Swimmer shoots on assignment for architecture and design firms around the globe. With a background in documentary film, her approach to architectural photography starts with what she considers the "found object," real moments in the life of a room, space, streetscape, or building. Then working with natural and available light to interpret the scene, she works on instinct and emotion, to depict the space as she experiences it. By incorporating human or animal elements, her images are imbued with a sense of life, movement, scale, and humanity. 

Her work has been featured in publications including Architect, Architectural Record, The New York Times, Dwell, Gray, Wallpaper*, LUXE, Metropolis, Residential Architect, Seattle Magazine, and Texas Architect, among others. Lara’s images have been included in national and international exhibits, as well as in numerous architecture and design books. She has also contributed to and authored over five books with publisher Documentary Media, most notably, PROCESS: Seattle Central Library, INSPIRED: Churches of Seattle, and now in the works from Artifice Press, READING ROOM, New and Reimagined Libraries of the American West, 2023. 

Lara was featured in the European Cultural Centre's 6th international TIME SPACE EXISTENCE exhibition at the 2023 Architecture Biennale in Venice. Sponsored by the Embassy of the UAE in the US, Lara was invited by the Meridian International Center to take part in an architecture delegation to the UAE in 2019. In 2014, she was included in the prestigious show, Beyond the Assignment,
with the Julius Shulman Institute at the WUHO Gallery in Hollywood. Lara was listed in ArchDaily’s international "12 Women in Architecture Photography"’ in 2018, and made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects in 2005. 

A Los Angeles native who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, Lara is now based in Seattle. She was a student of film theory and media at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School in Philadelphia, and at the Sorbonne's Center for Film and Critical Studies in Paris. Lara holds degrees in both Film & Media Studies and French Literature.