Styles / Modernist
Modernist architectural photography
- Key: the sun, from the camera’s left, at the side, high, hard.
- Fill: a flash on the camera, from the camera, hard.
- Lamp in the scene: a lamp, sign or screen, from the camera’s left, at the side, hard.
Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down. Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.
Seagram Building
Gottscho-Schleisner, Seagram Building, New York, 1958. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (gsc.5a16908); public domain, placed in the public domain by the photographers' heirs. Source: Seagram Building at Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (via Wikimedia Commons)
Lever House, 53rd St. and Park Ave., New York City
Gottscho-Schleisner, Lever House, 53rd St. and Park Ave., New York City, 1952. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (gsc.5a17254); public domain, placed in the public domain by the photographers' heirs. Source: Lever House, 53rd St. and Park Ave., New York City at Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (via Wikimedia Commons)
Photographs made to publish and promote modern buildings: glass houses, curtain-wall towers, terminals and their interiors, seen from a chosen oblique corner with every vertical kept parallel by a view camera. Hard or raking sun models the masses; for the signature dusk view the rooms are lit and the glass glows against a darkening sky. Interiors are filled with hidden flash, furniture and plants are arranged, and a few well-dressed figures act out the modern life the building promises. Prints are sharp, clean and mostly black and white, made for magazine pages.
How the look is made
- Keep every vertical vertical: work from a tripod with a view camera, keep the film back plumb and raise the lens with the rising front (or shift) instead of tilting the camera upwards.
- Find the one vantage point that shows the architect's idea most strikingly, usually an oblique corner view with a foreground edge leading in, and stop down so everything from that edge to the horizon is sharp.
- Plan the day around the sun: let hard or raking light model the masses, then come back at dusk with every light switched on so the glass glows against a sky that still holds some light.
- Make interiors look lit by their own fittings: hide flashbulbs or lamps, balance them against the daylight, and expose for minutes or in several passes when one exposure cannot hold the room and the view.
- Stage the life the building promises: arrange the furniture, bring in plants or a branch to frame the view, and place a few well-dressed figures small and at ease in the space.
- Print a clean, full-scale black and white for the magazine page, and let a single picture sell the building.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: the sun, from the camera’s left, at the side, high, hard.
Fill: a flash on the camera, from the camera, hard.
Lamp in the scene: a lamp, sign or screen, from the camera’s left, at the side, hard.
- Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down.
- Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
- Shadow edges
- Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).
- Shape & form
- Light turning gradually into shade across faces and objects, so their volume shows.
How the style is lit
- Hard or raking sun, the shoot scheduled around the sun's movement so it skims across facades and throws crisp shadows.
- Interiors filled with hidden flashbulbs or photo lamps, gelled where needed and balanced against the daylight, with windows blacked out between exposures.
- Dusk with every interior and terrace light switched on, the exposure timed or split so the sky still holds some light while the rooms glow.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- The style’s f/31 on 4 × 5 in gives about the depth of field of f/8.8 on full frame.
- Keep the long time for the movement: an ND filter of about 5 stops cuts the light enough.
- Then
- 24–60 mm · f/22–f/45 · 0.5 s–7.5 min · ISO 25–100 on 4 × 5 in, inferred from the gear and the look. 4 × 5 and 8 × 10 in. view cameras with wide to normal lenses, about 24–60 mm equivalent, stopped to f/22–f/45 for depth, so exposures run from a second to minutes; Shulman's Case Study House #22 was 7.5 minutes with flash inside. Apertures and film speeds are inferred.
- White balance
- Mostly black and white; colour on daylight or tungsten sheet film, lamps gelled to match the daylight; at dusk lit rooms stay warm against a blue sky (partly inferred).
- Focal length
- A wide view; near things loom and lines stretch towards the edges.
- Focus
- Everything sharp from the nearest stone to the horizon.
- Rendering
- Verticals kept vertical with camera movements or correction.
- Angle
- The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
- Distance
- Whole figures and their immediate surroundings.
- Balance
- Tilted lines and oblique movement drive the picture.
- Depth
- Separate events in the foreground, middle ground and background.
- Duration
- An unmoving scene, exposed slowly and carefully. Seconds or more: water turns to mist, lights become trails.
Direct
Place one to three figures small in the room or on the terrace, well clear of the architecture: seated or lounging in conversation, or standing at the glass with their back to the camera, looking out at the view; relaxed, absorbed in each other, rarely looking at the lens. Leave many views empty; in street views passers-by go by unposed.
- Line & energy
- Loose and unforced, as people stand and sit when they forget the camera, whether caught or coaxed by prompts.
- Several people
- People talking, playing, working or dancing together, absorbed in each other rather than the camera.
- Without a pose
- No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).
- The set-up
- A scene staged and directed like a film still or a painting.
Style the set
Everything looks new and spotless: furniture squared up, cushions plumped, surfaces cleared, plants, a branch or a bowl of flowers brought in to frame the view. Figures wear smart dresses or suits, hair groomed. Street exteriors are taken as found, parked cars and passers-by left as they are.
- Clothes
- Best clothes, jewellery and accessories put on for the studio or the occasion.
- Set & props
- Props chosen and placed for colour, texture and story: linen, ceramics, cutlery, flowers, scattered ingredients.
- Food & things
- Everything clean, new and flawless: no dust, creases, fingerprints or wear.
- How much is styled
- Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture. A few small touches (a tidied table, a straightened collar, a chosen outfit) that still look unplanned.
Finish
- Monochrome
- Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between.
- Film
- A view camera on a tripod: great detail, slow and deliberate.
- Texture
- Smooth tones with no visible grain. Every surface resolved, more than the eye would see.
- Shown as
- Each picture stands on its own.
- Shown in
- Pictures made for magazine pages and spreads.
Stay away from tilted angle, shallow depth of field, soft focus & diffusion, fisheye, selective plane, direct on-camera flash, visible grain, hdr & tone-mapped, snapshot, deadpan, flat form, perfectly imperfect and awkward & in-between.
Before you shoot it
Much of this work is still in copyright, and the archives are held by institutions and agencies (Julius Shulman's at the Getty Research Institute, Hedrich-Blessing's at the Chicago History Museum, Ezra Stoller's at Esto, the agency he founded, and Dell & Wainwright's work for The Architectural Review in the Architectural Press Archive at the RIBA): never prompt by a photographer's name or recreate a known picture.
Photographs that define it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
Herbert F. Johnson, Jr., Wingspread, residence in Racine, Wisconsin
Gottscho-Schleisner, Herbert F. Johnson, Jr., Wingspread, residence in Racine, Wisconsin, 1939. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (gsc.5a03875); public domain, placed in the public domain by the photographers' heirs. Source: Herbert F. Johnson, Jr., Wingspread, residence in Racine, Wisconsin at Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (via Wikimedia Commons)
United Nations Building, taken from Welfare Island
Gottscho-Schleisner, United Nations Building, taken from Welfare Island, 1957. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (gsc.5a31093); public domain, placed in the public domain by the photographers' heirs. Source: United Nations Building, taken from Welfare Island at Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (via Wikimedia Commons)
In copyright, so linked
- Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960 (Pierre Koenig, architect) , Julius Shulman, 1960. Getty Research Institute, Julius Shulman Photography Archive (2004.R.10).
- Mies van der Rohe (with Philip Johnson and Kahn and Jacobs), Seagram Building, New York City, 1958 , Ezra Stoller, 1957. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
With other styles
Pairs with Straight photography. Straight photography gives the sharp, full-scale print from a large camera; add corrected verticals, an oblique corner view and dusk light to turn a straight study into a portrait of a building.
Pairs with New Vision. New Vision supplies steep angles and graphic cast shadows; borrow one strong diagonal or shadow pattern but keep the verticals corrected so the building still reads as a whole.
Pairs with New Objectivity photography. New Objectivity photographed the Neues Bauen square-on, sharp and sober; borrow its frontal elevation for a facade or a detail, then add the chosen corner, the sun or dusk light and the staged life when the building has to be sold.
The opposite: Staged tableau photography. Staged tableau shares the dusk-lit house, the lit windows and the directed figures but turns them uncanny and cinematic; choose this style when the building should be desired, that one when the scene should unsettle.
The opposite: New Topographics. New Topographics turns the same view camera on ordinary buildings, level and deadpan in flat noon light; switch to it when the brief wants critique rather than advocacy, and drop the dusk glow and the posed figures.
The opposite: Düsseldorf School of Photography. The Düsseldorf School shows architecture frontal, evenly lit, empty and at gallery scale; choose it when the building should be examined, and this style when it should be desired.
Sources
- Julius Shulman, Photographer of Modernist California Architecture, Dies at 98 (Andy Grundberg, New York Times, 17 July 2009), reprinted by Docomomo US: https://www.docomomo-us.org/news/julius-shulman-photographer-of-modernist-california-architecture-dies-at-98 (postwar commercial architecture photographers working for architects and magazines such as Life, House & Garden and Good Housekeeping; Stoller and Hedrich Blessing as peers; almost always black-and-white film; one of the first to include inhabitants; staged tableaus to promote the idea of casual living; Case Study House Program begun by Arts & Architecture in 1945, Shulman photographed 18 of the 26 built; CSH #22, 1960, two well-dressed women in a living room above the Los Angeles basin; Kaufmann House 1947 at dusk, house, pool and landscape exposed separately, 45 minutes in all; 1936 Neutra start; moved from a Kodak Vest Pocket to a view camera; rented potted plants and a walnut branch on a light stand to frame a tract house; in business full time until the late 1980s, 'when architectural tastes had shifted to postmodernism')
- Julius Shulman, Modernity and the Metropolis, Getty Center, 11 October 2005 – 22 January 2006: https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/shulman/ (carefully posed models set against streamlined furnishings and breathtaking vistas; the glamour of the California dream; intuitive timing and distinctive camera angles; mass, shadow and light; archive of 260,000 prints, negatives and colour transparencies; his book The Photography of Architecture and Design, 1977)
- Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960, Getty exhibition page: https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/shulman/casestudy_oz.html (Pierre Koenig, architect; gelatin silver print; 2004.R.10)
- Growing Up in One of L.A.'s Most Iconic Houses (Amy Hood, Getty News, 19 July 2021): https://www.getty.edu/news/growing-up-in-one-of-los-angeles-most-iconic-houses (a May night in 1960; camera set up beside the pool; a seven-minute exposure of the glass-walled living room, introduced with 'Legend has it'; Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Getty Research Institute, 2004.R.10)
- Framing the image (Architectural Record, August 2009): https://architecturalrecord.com/articles/11249-framing-the-image (CSH #22: lens open on the Los Angeles night for 7.5 minutes with his 4×5 camera while a flash lit two women inside)
- Julius Shulman, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Shulman (1910–2009; Neutra's Kun Residence, 1936; Los Angeles studio 1950; archive acquired by the Getty in 2004)
- Image Maker: Ezra Stoller (Paul Makovsky, Metropolis, 1 December 2012): https://metropolismag.com/programs/image-maker-ezra-stoller/ (about 3,500 projects and 60,000 images; large-format camera, first a Linhof, then an 8×10 camera with black-and-white, daylight and tungsten colour sheet film, lights and cases of flashbulbs; lights gelled and windows blacked out between exposures; shoots planned around weather and the sun; Fortune industrial work of the 1940s; 'Stollerized')
- Ezra Stoller, SFMOMA: https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Ezra_Stoller/ (1915–2004; Seagram Building, Fallingwater, Salk Institute; Philip Johnson's 'Stollerized'; Seagram Building prints of 1957 and 1958 and TWA Terminal 1962 in the collection)
- Ezra Stoller, Mies van der Rohe (with Philip Johnson and Kahn and Jacobs), Seagram Building, New York City, 1958, SFMOMA object page: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2004.54/ (dated 1957; gelatin silver print, 16 × 20 in.; Accessions Committee Fund purchase, 2004.54; © Esto)
- Ezra Stoller, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Stoller (Architectural Record, Architectural Forum, Fortune, House & Garden, House Beautiful; first AIA Gold Medal for Photography, 1961; Esto founded in the 1960s)
- The Dream of Midcentury Modern in Black and White Photos (Mimi Zeiger, Aperture, 26 March 2020): https://aperture.org/editorial/ezra-stoller-midcentury-modern/ (Stoller's postwar photographs of American modern architecture; 'crisp, black-and-white prints'; 'always precise about natural light and time of day'; Shulman's photography 'most immediately comes to mind when thinking about mid-century modern residential architecture')
- Hedrich Blessing Photographers, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedrich_Blessing_Photographers (founded in Chicago in 1929 by Ken Hedrich and Henry Blessing; 'Don't make photographs, think them'; Architectural Forum commission of 1937 for Wright's recent works, photographer not named; Mies, Kahn, Saarinen, SOM; the Chicago History Museum houses the archive of the first 50 years, 1929–1979)
- Building Images: Seventy Years of Photography at Hedrich Blessing, National Building Museum, 2003 (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/20101230040403/http://www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/exhibitions/hedrich-blessing.html (instead of traditional documentary views, a vantage point from which the architect's design intent was revealed most strikingly; unconventional perspectives, unusual compositions and dramatic lighting; Ken Hedrich, De Soto Pavilion, A Century of Progress, 1933)
- Hedrich-Blessing photograph collection, part 2, 1969–1989 (bulk 1970–1979), Chicago History Museum finding aid (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/2022/http://chsmedia.org/media/fa/fa/1998/hbpt2-inv.htm (negatives and transparencies 8×10 in. and smaller; in the 1970s Bill Engdahl specialised in cityscape and dusk photographs; Bob Harr's emulsion stripping for clients such as Gerald D. Hines Interests combined photographs of models of unbuilt buildings with photographs of their sites, a late sales practice not counted in the genome)
- Samuel H. Gottscho biography, Library of Congress American Memory (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/2012/http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/gottscho/gottbio.html (Samuel H. Gottscho, 1875–1971, and William H. Schleisner, 1912–1962; professional at 50; Schleisner joined in 1935)
- Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, rights and restrictions, Library of Congress (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/2015/http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/104_gott.html (in the public domain; placed in the public domain by the heirs of the photographers)
- Samuel Gottscho, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Gottscho (photographs in American Architect and Architecture and Architectural Record; about 29,000 images at the Library of Congress)
- The Architectural Review, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Architectural_Review (Hubert de Cronin Hastings joint editor from 1927; bold use of layout, typefaces and photographs; leading position in the discourse on Modernism by about 1935)
- Parting shot: Witley Park, near Godalming, Surrey (Valeria Carullo, RIBA Journal, 30 January 2015), archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20250420164621/https://www.ribaj.com/culture/witley-park-near-godalming-surrey (Dell & Wainwright 'one of the great partnerships in the history of British photography'; their work for the Architectural Review 'extremely influential on both their contemporaries in the 1930s and the younger generation of photographers who operated after the war'; Mark Oliver Dell, 1883–1959; Herbert Lionel Wainwright, born in London in 1902; credit Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection)
- Photograph: Shrubs Wood, quintessential modern house of 1930s Britain (Valeria Carullo, RIBA Journal, 1 July 2024), archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20251208094540/https://www.ribaj.com/culture/parting-shot-shrubs-wood-stairs-dell-wainwright-modernism/ (Dell & Wainwright, 'official photographers of the Architectural Review in the 1930s'; their photograph of the stair at Eric Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff's Shrubs Wood and its dramatic cast shadows)
- Straight photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_photography (a scene depicted in sharp focus and detail; 'This emphasis on the sharp and detailed silver prints dominated modernist photographic aesthetics into the 1970s')
- Werner Mantz: Architectures and People, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 14 October 2017 – 21 January 2018: https://www.museum-ludwig.de/en/ausstellungen/archiv/2018/werner-mantz-architectures-and-people (one of the most prominent photographers of the Neues Bauen in 1920s Cologne; from 1926 commissions from Wilhelm Riphahn, Peter Franz Nöcker and Caspar Maria Grod; published in Bauwelt, Die Form and Bauwarte; 'objective, black-and-white austerity')
- Werner Mantz, German Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Mantz (worked in the style of Neue Sachlichkeit and Neues Bauen of the 1920s; house photographer of Wilhelm Riphahn from 1926; published from 1927 in Bauwelt and Die Form; used light as his chief means of design)
- Architectural photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_photography (perspective control and non-converging verticals with view cameras, whose lens can be tilted or shifted relative to the film plane; deep depth of field; twilight and ambient light for exteriors)
- 'Framing the image', Architectural Record, August 2009: https://architecturalrecord.com/articles/11249-framing-the-image ('For the Koenig house, Shulman opened his lens on the cosmos of the Los Angeles night for 7.5 minutes with his 4x5 camera, at the same time that a flash highlighted two women standing inside')
- Amy Hood, 'Growing Up in One of L.A.'s Most Iconic Houses', Getty News, 19 July 2021: https://www.getty.edu/news/growing-up-in-one-of-los-angeles-most-iconic-houses (a seven-minute exposure of the glass-walled living room on a May night in 1960, introduced with 'legend has it')
- Paul Makovsky, 'Image Maker: Ezra Stoller', Metropolis, 1 December 2012: https://metropolismag.com/programs/image-maker-ezra-stoller/ (first a Linhof; for the early work an 8-by-10 camera with black-and-white, daylight and tungsten colour sheet film, lights and cases of flashbulbs; several exposures of each view; for interiors flashbulbs to change, lights to gel and windows to black out between exposures)
- Architectural photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_photography (view cameras whose lens can be shifted or tilted to keep verticals from converging; deep depth of field; twilight exteriors)
- Paul Makovsky, 'Image Maker: Ezra Stoller', Metropolis, 1 December 2012: https://metropolismag.com/programs/image-maker-ezra-stoller/ (sheet film 'black and white, color daylight, and tungsten'; for interiors 'flashbulbs to change, lights to gel' and windows to black out between exposures; several exposures of each view in black and white and in colour)