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Although a fine writer, lecturer and broadcaster, John Donat will principally be remembered as one of Britain's foremost photographers of architecture who boldly challenged the genre's accepted conventions.
The son of Oscar-winning actor Robert Donat, and related through his mother to the pioneering Arts and Crafts architect CFA Voysey, Donat, like many other postwar British architectural photographers, trained as an architect. After studying at the Architectural Association, he joined the Schools Division of the London County Council Architects Department but was drawn increasingly to photography. A trip to Turkey and Iran in 1956 with his friends and fellow students Peter Ahrends, Richard Burton and Paul Koralek had produced a fine crop of pictures of Middle Eastern architecture, but it was successive visits to Crete in...