Architecture in Focus: Art and Architecture Through the Lens of Two Photographers: The evolution, issues and the future of architectural photography
with Nick Merrick and Gregg Murphey
"It's Ken Hedrich, I think," said photographer Nick Merrick, "who made the statement very early on that 'we don't take photographs, we make them.' And there's an intellectual process we go through trying to understand the design, and then try to translate that."
From 1977 to 79, Nick Merrick and Greg Murphey were both assistants at the iconic architectural photography firm of Hedrich Blessing. Murphey would go on to form his own firm, Greg Murphey Studios, Inc, while Merrick remained at Hedrich Blessing, where he is now a senior partner. The two men were guests at the Chicago Architectural Club's December Event, Architecture in Focus: Art and Architecture Through the Lens of Two Photographers, where they both displayed their work and engaged in a lively discussion with club members.
Both men talked of the long, deliberate process of photographing a building, and the value of working closely with the architect. "We have to plan together closely," said Murphey. "It's a whole process. You stalk the building. That's what you're doing. You're taking in what the designer's saying. You discover things as you're walking around that you've haven't seen, maybe for four days before. You go around the corner, and whammo, there's the shot. Being closely collaborative is critical as part of the planning." Murphey presented images from a wide range of shoots, ranging from oilfields in Iraq, to the American European Express, to I.M. Pei's Pyramid at the Louvre in Paris as it was under construction. "I've been there since it's been finished," Murphey says, "and I wouldn't want to photograph it finished - I loved it the way it was."
Merrick concentrated on presenting just two projects, Zimmer Gunsel Frasca's FDA laboratory and administrative building in Irvine, California, and the former headquarters of Reynolds Aluminum in Richmond, Virginia, designed by Gordon Bunshaft in 1957, now restored and serving the same function for Philip Morris. "I try to make my photographs look as if I hadn't done much," says Merrick, "but all of them are carefully considered, every detail. Some take hours. Some take minutes."
"Nobody tells you to make these pictures," continued Merrick. "You discover them. You find them. The light reflecting off the concrete and lighting the other side of the room there, these things are discovered, yet they're telling moments where the materials come together, the formal qualities of the design get expressed in ways that I hope you find beautiful. I do."
On How Technology Has Changed Architectural Photography
"We are still convinced," says Merrick, "that the highest quality of image we can reproduce is film capture, and then digital scan."
"In my opinion," added Murphey, "the actual art of making those images - the study and preparation - that hasn't changed at all. What has changed, of course, is the media . . . Digital systems are extremely unreliable. The technology we're using, really the third generation of digital lenses, we'll laugh five years from now at how primitive they were and how expensive they were. We're using the stuff they used in the Cuban missile crisis. It's 25-year-old technology based on what exists in government and in certain sections of industry. When I can have a system that has great backups and lots of redundancy, they I'm ready to do it, but I'll cling to film and transparencies as long as possible."
"I must tell you," related Merrick, "that two weeks ago I was in Denver photographing the new convention center. This is a Fentress-Bradburn design, a client of mine for 20 years. The marketing guy walks up to me and hands me a stack of renderings, virtual renderings, and he said, Curt would like you to translate these into photographs. It was the most bizarre experience. I sat there. I didn't know what to say. I said, who produced these? Who picked this angle on this spot and said this is where the photograph is going to be? It was really interesting, but, yes, they were amazingly accurate. They went to a huge amount of trouble and selected views that they thought would explain their building in the best light, and they were clearly trying to make them photographic views."
"Curt Fentress is an amazing marketer, so I figured there had to be a reason why he wanted this, so I kept trying to probe, what's he thinking? And he said that when you go in front of a public group for a competition - he was trying to get another convention center in San Diego- you show them drawings, and they always wonder if you can come in on budget, can you actually produce that building." Putting the original renderings side-by-side with photos of the building as actually built allowed the marketing people to say, "Here it is; it's finished, on time, on budget."
On Why You Seldom See People in Architectural Photographs
"It comes down to a technical issue," said Murphey. "We use long exposures, we use multiple exposures, and if you're not posed like a mannequin, - you see the guy sitting like this because he has to sit so still - it doesn't work."
"You recognize, of course, that people are messy," added Merrick. "It's actually a question that comes up all the time in our work. I see these pictures as investigations of design concepts, and explaining design concepts. If a client wants to see it in use, it's a whole different kind of photography - we have to go with small cameras, we have to be able to work with available light, and all these other things. We will do that. We do do it, but, quite frankly, they're not my favorite pictures. I find them not as interesting."
Architectural Photography and Time
"You guys all work in three dimensions, length, height, width, etc.," said Murphey. "We have the fourth one, always: time, the transition of what times does to a building and a space as the light changes through a day or through a period or on a cloudy day. It transforms things and you might wind up going back a second or third time just to capture what you didn't see in that passage of time. Time is a huge (factor) and we work in four dimensions rather than three."
Added Merrick, "I had a photographer describe what Gregg is talking about, as saying that a architectural photographers are engaged in something huge -the earth has to turn. Murphey: "And the position of the sun." Merrick: "And you wait for that. One luxury I have at Hedrich Blessing we have a kind of weather service that we keep on retainer. I can call from anywhere in the planet and say I'm in such and such a place, the clouds are low. What's going to happen? Is there going to be a break at some point in the next hour or so? They'll track it, and they're usually pretty darn good. "
Sometimes bright sun can even be an obstacle to making a good photograph. Murphey talked of shooting the new Chinese American Service League building designed by architect Jeanne Gang, whose exterior is faced with titanium shingles. "That was perfect only on a cloudy day," he said, "because the titanium surface, on a blue day, or even a partial sun, was going to be bluish, not titanium, so it depends on the individual project."
On Long Shoots and Bill Engdahl
A question from the audience spoke of an alternative method of photographing buildings where, rather than shooting over several days and waiting for optimum conditions of weather and sunlight, the photographer works quickly, with whatever conditions exist at the moment. For Murphey, this brought back memories of legendary Hedrich Blessing photographer Bill Engdahl. "I celebrate him tonight because he was this completely strange dude, man. He wore a brown leisure suit, with a big wide belt, and he would like mumble, he would hardly talk, and yet some of his photographs, they were beautiful. This guy would just like hop out of a car while it was moving by, he would drop the tripod - he'd know instinctively where to put it, and then he'd just do it. I drew a lot from him, because we were getting so formal, and so involved with some of the big corporate interiors. He would do incredible exteriors and incredible detail shots, and then right to the bar, right to the bar. I've learned so much of the work is about being simple, and letting it go - not being in charge of myself, but just letting her rip. And there's still days when I say, you're with me today, Bill. This is your day."
On the Heroic in Architectural Photography
Another question from the audience addressed the issue on how commercial photographers tend to idealize the buildings they're shooting, "I find that that is almost always the case that when I see a photograph, and see that kind of distortion of scale, it becomes a much more heroic experience than when you actually see the building and the scale of the building . . . sometimes the expectation of the photograph doesn't always meet with the building in reality."
"Clearly, we're commercial artists," responded Merrick. "It's an important aspect of what we do. They commission us to create those heroic images. Personally, I have consciously made an attempt to not shoot the heroic, big gesture photographs. It never appealed to me. So I tend to work with longer lenses, at greater distances, so that the scale of of objects and things in the frame are more the way we experience them."
"When you see younger, more inexperienced work," added Murphey, "or work that's not up to standard, invariably most of it was shot with very wide angle lenses, which when you're young and first starting, they can appeal, you can say, 'Well, I got the whole space,' . . . (but) optical distortion enters the picture. The longer focal length, the more considered views, those are harder to do, there's more time involved, but they render space much more how our eye sees it. all of our eyes." When a client asks him if he has a fish eye lens, Murphey's said his response was, "'Oh my God, no.' I do, but I never use it,"
"People would say to me," concluded Merrick, "'Nick, these pictures are lying. They're lying about the building - they're so heroic, so pristine that it's not the real experience of the building.' My response is that of the thousand of possible realities that you could have experiencing that building; I picked the best possible one. "