I often tell my stressed-out clients that there is no such thing as a perfect project. I’ve seen hundreds of incredible homes, maybe even thousands at this point. Every project has shortcomings, every project has access restrictions, every project has a thing to work around: the construction site next door, the contractor frantically (or slowly) trying to lay down the last floorboard and patch the drywall, homeowners that don’t want you there, aggressive tenants and business owners who don’t understand why the architect needs pictures (they’ve already been paid, after all!), the oft-unfounded, “I’m famous and I don’t want people casing my house” celebrities, every job a curveball of what it’ll be. With these homes, we had none of that. Come at 5:00 a.m. Come at noon. Come at 9:00 p.m. Take 3 days. Do whatever it takes.
Not to say that it was easy, though. A constant source of brain-wrinkling anxiety for me while photographing these projects was dealing with the fact that it was hard to take a bad picture. Easy to walk in, put the camera almost anywhere, and find a ‘good enough’ photograph. But to actually be able to find the great compositions that will turn the remarkable into the unforgettable, and then to get them at the right time of day was something very difficult to do. I was overwhelmed with what I can only describe as a smorgasbord of possibilities in every house. An inordinate amount of time was spent distilling, refining, trying to pull the absolute best out of each home, rather than just walking in and pointing the camera in a general direction with a wideangle lens. Sure, you could fly through and deliver 150 images and show everything bu t in the process, you’d show almost nothing. The results of my brain wrinkling, I hope you’ll agree, were spectacular.
In the end, these ended up being a few of the most demanding shoots in my career on both a physical scale and an interpersonal scale. While I have carte blanche access, how do you keep multiple clients happy? Oftentimes, client needs were at odds. I’ve got an architect who demands rigorous perfection, and real estate agents who need photos yesterday.
After all, this is a fifty-million-dollar asset we’re talking about and we gotta get it sold. The pressure was definitely on to deliver.
Many of the shoot days were sunrise to sunset on multiple days in a row in summer during LA heatwaves with the house open to the elements. Overheated cameras failing at the most inopportune times, worn out shoe soles, placing cameras on the edge of cliff-hugging infinity pools, running on pure coffee by day two. Unfortunately, I’m not one who can just take a few pictures; they have to be the best they possibly can be, which means getting there for the moment and then forcing myself (and my crew) to stay until late. Twelve-hour days were the norm. I’ve always got to push as far as I can, try to go the extra mile, and squeeze the most juice out of these projects as I could. To go beg the neighbors to put the camera on their lawn, because that was the best shot. To sneak in to the construction site next door after-hours, because that was the only way to see the entire home. To balance the tripod on a car outside. Quickly make it happen!
And that’s why the trust that was instilled in me for these projects was so incredible. I truly don’t believe I would have pushed as hard as I did if there was a client breathing down my neck the entire time, telling me where to put the camera and how to take the picture.
The freedom afforded gave me the energy to tackle these projects to the absolute best of my ability and leave no angle uncovered or time of day unexplored. As far as architectural photography goes, it was an absolute honor to spend so much of my working time amongst these homes with nothing to do but make the absolute best photographs possible.
Despite all of that, I’m still torn. I had the incredible privilege of photographing these houses it was my job to do justice to the countless man-and-woman-hours that were poured into making them come to life. The pressure was immense, and I truly hope
that I did the best job I could have done in order to commemorate the tireless work of everyone involved from designers to accountants, masons to drywallers.
Their lives are inextricably linked with these projects, and the photographs are all the world will ever see of these homes once they are sold. What an immense honor it has been to hold the camera that documents them.
But that is what’s so great about architectural photography a relinquishing of control. It is a only on projects where a significant amount of trust is placed with a photographer to see a project with clear eyes, unbiased, untethered from the hours of toil on details and colors and finishes that a photographer can create images that do justice to the work done over the course of years.
Of all the bedrooms I’ve ever photographed, this is one of my favorites. For some of these shots, we could go down a rabbit hole. We’re at a junction here. We could go this way, that way, this way, that way. Every photo has all these moving pieces it ’s like an orchestra. MK
The stair floats in the space. It’s a self-supporting, very thin steel structure. They shipped it here and dropped it in place. It was amazing to watch.
