Timothy Soar: Images of architecture.

Architecture and the photograph

0:00Hello. As George Barclay almost, almost said, if architecture was built in a city but no one took its picture, did it make a sound? Photography is intrinsic to architecture, so much so that most of us only know most buildings through the images made of them. What the photographer does then is to manifest architecture in the general imagination. One might argue that they make buildings architecture, elevating them beyond context and into objects, known, identifiable and desired. That means the photograph has in itself meaning, which in turn lends photography ethical content. So it's an important job. It needs to be done well.

To do it well requires skill and craft and intent. What, though, is a good photograph? To answer that, I spoke to architectural photographer extraordinaire Tim Saw about his work, his philosophy, artistry, ethics and the mastery required of his method. As he puts it in our conversation, one of the agonies of making photographs is that I'm very aware that what I'm responding to is something I can never capture. It's always just beyond my capacity, the capacity of the camera. It's a felt but unseen, or perhaps unseen.

0:59It's a feelable thing. Beginning in social photography, Tim's is a lovely story of pursuing technical precision and emotional depth to try and convey both architects' visions and buildings' embodied selves. If you want to and can, please support the Ayers for Architecture podcast by listening and sharing, and by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me A Coffee. Links to these and to Tim are in the podcast description. Ayers for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space.

Early life in Cambridge

1:32Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ayers for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted to be talking today to Tim Saw. Tim, thank you for joining me. You are a highly esteemed architectural photographer, and I have enjoyed your social media posts a lot recently, but we did meet when you were photographing the Kent School of Architecture's recently refurbished studios. We did, for Sam Jacobs. Yeah, Sam Jacobs. Wonderful work there. Fantastic. Yeah, lovely, lovely job.

2:03Lovely job and a lovely man. But I was, I'm always interested in the role of the image in the production of architecture, and the synergies and reciprocity between these two things. So I thought we could have a little conversation about that. But before we do, maybe you'd be so kind to introduce yourself. Right. Where to start? Well, born and brought up in Cambridge. My father was a lawyer, my mother a teacher. My father's father was the head at Enfield Grammar. My grandmother was also a teacher, and her father was, had been past president for the National Union of Teachers.

2:40So I suppose, as a family lineage, I would have anticipated going into teaching or that kind of role. Certainly, I think of myself as a, I don't know, a facilitator of the transmission of information rather than, you know, principally as a photographer. I mean, so there are nuances there that I maybe ought to spend some time in analysis dealing with.

3:15My father was a very interesting man. He was a potter, a painter, a furniture builder. He loved his legal aid work, so we were never a wealthy family. He basically gave his career up in the support of noble causes. But it meant that the household was always full of interesting people. So because of his work on working with planning and the Cambridge Cottage Improvement Society, we would have people like the Smithsons floating through the house.

3:50So it was an architecturally informed place. So my move into photography, I had started in engineering. And what, at college? At college, yes. Instead of doing A-levels, I had adopted, I had elected to do an ordinary national. I think I was a very restless young man, and I wanted to do something rather than not do something, as it were.

4:26So I was busily engaged in that, and I love it, and loved it. But I found, I think, you know, when you're 18, 19, and a restless disposition, I was also looking for other things to do. My father was a very keen amateur photographer, so I had learnt, as a young man, how to process film, I think just as an exercise to be closer to Dad.

4:56So I was using my photography to get into rock concerts and gigs and all those exciting things. Well, at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. Exactly that sort of thing, exactly. And because in the late 70s, they were very often quite... Wild. Or colourful situations. I was making photographs, effectively, of riots. So I came to the attention of the Sunday Times. I got sponsored by Peter Dunn, who was a lovely man, the senior photographer at the Sunday Times,

5:28who used to just give me boxes of film and tell me to go and photograph exciting things that young people were doing. And I think at that point, I just thought, well, photography is so much more engaging and available. All I needed to do was turn up and risk my life in a riot to take a few snaps.

Moving north to Blackpool

5:51So that went on for a little while. I decided I should go to college. I started on a degree course, didn't finish it. Where at? Blackpool College, which at the time, there were three professional qualifying colleges in the country. Blackpool, I honestly can't remember the other two. Bournemouth, I think, was another.

6:12Blackpool was the most successful one. It turned out the most photographers. So if you actually... I had a place in a lot of much more glamorous colleges, but none were as effective at producing working photographers. And I think that was my instinct. Having, you know, arriving in my first year with national front pages under my belt, I felt that, you know, what I should be doing was accumulating some really powerful technique

6:43rather than be writing 10,000 word theses on the meaning of photography. What I wanted to do was, you know, just improve my skills and get out into the workplace, which I did. I came back to Cambridge in the Easter of the second term with a project to photograph glass. I phoned up a local architect, a man by the name of David Thurlow, who was then Design Group Cambridge.

7:16He asked me to photograph a building that he'd just finished. It went on to win our IBA award. At that point, he got me to photograph pretty much everything he was building. And, you know, the rest, as they say, is history. So that was that. I mean, I was tremendously lucky. I assisted very briefly a British architectural photographer called Richard Bryan, which gave me some great insight. He was working with people like James Sterling.

7:48So I got a real insight into how the vernacular, as it were, worked.

7:55And almost immediately I was working with people like Nick Grimshaw and Norman Foster. And so looking back on it, it was, I was extraordinarily lucky. I think right time, right place. Yeah. Sounds pretty like that. Although taking yourself out of Cambridge up to Blackpool is, I can only imagine. Yeah. That must have been something else. My mother was from Manchester. She was from Oldham.

8:27Okay. Literally. I mean, yeah, a working class, millworking family, back-to-back terraces. So I was very comfortable with the idea of going north because, to me, it just meant a very particular kind of community, a very particular kind of spirit. I mean, I tend to get happier and happier the further north I move once, you know, I'm away from the very particular pressures of London. I think you begin to experience England as a very different kind of entity.

9:00Yeah. And Blackpool, the tracers are off in Blackpool. So this was in the 1980s that you were doing this? Yeah. Yeah. So it was really nosediving at that point. It was in distress. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it had a strong community spirit. It had a very particular way of doing things. It had a, you know, it drew its population from all over, a very strong Scottish contingent, I guess. You know, if you went on holiday to Blackpool, you'd retire to Blackpool.

9:33So it had a very particular energy, which I very much enjoyed. You know, I learned to call bingo and do all that sort of thing. I can remember going on a studio trip with a couple of wonderful tutors when I was at Sheffield, and I got absolutely hammered the night before, but woke up very early in the morning, probably still half cut, and went on a walk and sort of wandered into a rock

10:03making factory, you know, Blackpool rock making. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which was like walking into some kind of effervescent dream. The air was kind of white with powdered sugar. And as I remember it, everybody's teeth was black. Who did you exhibit along?

Darkrooms and Cambridge artists

10:21Before you started on this commercial journey into, having been taken on by the Times, as you said, were you exhibiting your work? Yeah, one of my first jobs in Cambridge, I worked in a darkroom, the Cambridge Photographer's Darkroom, which was an underground pit on Hills Road. So I would be printing and processing other people's film. And that meant that I was in daily contact with most of the artists in Cambridge because, you know, they had to get somewhere for their own sort of prints and artwork photographs

10:54to be made and looked after. So my first exhibits in Cambridge were done with, I mean, an old friend of mine, an Australian artist, Charlie Sheard, who was an abstract painter. And we would show at Clare Hall, the Ralph Erskine building. So we were doing that.

11:18Yeah, I mean, Cambridge is a small community. So, you know, you're hanging out with some really interesting people who are very open and very warm. And you can get away with all sorts of conceits and nonsense if you're minded to. And I think because I was working in the lab, we had just enormous resource. So we could make as many things as we could think of. So it was a fascinating time.

11:53I mean, Charlie's doing great work now in Sydney. He's gone back home and he's exhibiting all over and doing great things. So, you know, it was a fecund time.

12:04How do you move from the dynamic world of movement and riot and party and agitation to this world of architectural photography, which is by its nature static? And oftentimes, out of necessity, I think, as I understand it, devoid of any humans.

Shifting to large format cameras

12:23How does that switch work? How did it work for you? Yeah. I mean, like so many things in life, it's just a combination of factors and forces. I mean, as a photographer, I was sort of aesthetically drawn to large format. The making of photographs with a big camera in the style. People will know Ansel Adams and Edward Wesson, Paul Strand, Ebbing Penn. Large cameras, large film, a very considered, very precise way of making photographs that also carried with it a very, very high technical bar of entry, which I found very compelling.

13:02You know, in order to make a really good photograph on a large format camera, you had to be crash-hot stuff. I mean, it doesn't forgive any kind of error at all. So that is one aspect. And then when you look at the practice of photography as a commercial activity, you'll find that you can, if you're going to make a living, the tendency is either to get drawn into social photography, weddings and such like, and back in the 80s, certainly, large commercial advertising.

13:42Which is fun, so far as, I mean, the house has been paid for by my advertising photography, which is not work that I refer to now, but it's what kept me going through a lot of the 90s. Photographing chairs, tables, filing cabinets.

14:00You know, that's a perfectly sort of fruitful way to engage in a life in photography. But I think because of my experience in Cambridge with a house full of design thoughts and architects, I think I just, I felt more comfortable in that world thinking, you know, those thoughts, responding to those ambitions. And it just felt a lot more appealing and comfortable making architectural photographs for architects.

14:38Because, you know, that is a process that I understood and felt very comfortable with. So I think... It's a slower process, isn't it? It's much slower, much more, it requires a great deal of concentration and the capacity to hold long-form thought and to be able to associate the things in front of you with the things that you've learned and the things that you understand. Because you're developing a narrative that has to connect with your audience's understanding of the sort of basic principles of the things that you're photographing.

15:16I mean, you're constantly referencing other buildings, other photographers, just so that the work has, fits into a way that other people think about the world that you're sort of realising for them. It's, yeah. I mean, plus the fact, if you've ever photographed a ride, you don't want to make a living doing that. It's an extremely scary thing.

15:52Yeah. Out of your early mid-twenties, I doubt that adrenaline rush really... Well, I was rowing at the time, you know, yeah, I was fit as a butcher's dog. I could sprint. I was scared of nothing. Now, no, I can't think of anything that's less agreeable.

16:12But that movement from movement to stasis, I think, is quite an interesting one. I guess we'll get to this, but like, how do you bring that life to a building? Because I think this is a really fascinating idea, the idea that you are constantly in reference both to the legacy of photography, the legacy of building culture, but also the collective consciousness of what these things connote and denote. I just find that a very, very alluring idea, in a way I kind of, without wishing to sound rude, very surprising. Yeah, okay.

16:42Well, I guess we need to unpack that as a thought, don't we? We need to think about what you mean by movement. So, I'm going to take it that what you're implying is activity, you know, people. Yes, throwing bricks at things. They're throwing bricks at things, yeah.

17:02Now, generally speaking, it's not an activity that you're going to find in many buildings. So, you know, perforce, we'll have to drill down then into what about that activity is interesting to us and why and how it's, you know, has purpose in describing the narrative of the building. And I think, yeah, Ansel Adams used to say there are two people in every photograph and he shot landscapes with nobody in them. And he would speak about the viewer and the photographer.

17:33So, a photograph with no human presence is not, perforce, necessarily empty. It already has within it your imagination and the photographer's imagination. So, you know, we can imply, infer presence just in the way that we construct the photograph, the things that we allow to occur within the photograph, you know, the placement of objects or, you know, there's a huge difference between putting in a book or a cup of coffee or just those simple things that our brain will seize on and play with quite happily.

18:09I think what I'm trying to drive at is that, you know, in everything that a photographer does, there is the intention of the photograph. What is the story that we're trying to illustrate? Where is the narrative? What is the connection that we're attempting to make with our audiences? Because when you're photographing architecture, it's not just a building and it's not just the architect's intention. It's not just the place.

18:39You know, the building exists in its light, in its climate on that day. And that's always a very specific response. You know, if I visited the same building 365 days, we'd get a different portfolio every single time. So, you know, that implies that you're making a new relationship with the architecture every time you're there. So then you have to try and work out what that relationship is. What is it that the photographer is responding to?

19:11And that is a complicated set of conversations, I think.

Photographing architects' offices

19:17I mean, way back in the early 2000s, when I went digital, I felt there was a tremendous opportunity to combine my press work with my architectural photography work. We had very small, very responsive digital cameras made by Canon. And I could, with some tilt and shift lenses, tilt and shift lenses are how architectural photographers resolve perspective and uprights with a, to make a recognisably architectural photograph.

19:51And together with Isabel Allen, who was then the editor of the Architects Journal, we set about photographing 50 architects' offices. And I don't think we were particularly interested in what the inside of an architect's office looked like. What we were interested in was what an occupied space looked like, an occupied architectural space. And it seemed to us that we could encourage the readers of the magazine to think about occupied spaces by this slight conceit of hand.

20:27You know, what we were talking about, a journalistic exercise illustrating architects' offices. But what we were actually trying to do was encourage people to photograph their buildings with people in them, which we could do because this, you know, miraculous new digital technology. We could work at shutter speeds that involved, I mean, without having to unpick the technique of it. And previously, if you were working on a large format camera, your film speeds would have been slow. Your apertures would have been very, very small.

20:58You'd have been working at exposure times from 2 seconds to 8 to 20. So if there was a person in the photograph, effectively, they would be blurred or not there at all. I mean, if you look at the very early daguerreotypes of Paris, the first known photograph of a human being is a man having his shoes shined. Because he's actually sat still long enough for the length of the exposure. All the horses and carts, the man shining his shoes, they've all disappeared because their movement hasn't registered.

21:28During the length of the exposure. So, you know, and that's part, that's one of the tropes of architectural photography is that they are empty. Well, they don't need to be. So you then have to ask yourself, why would that be the case? And what, what is it you're trying to inculcate in making empty photographs? You know, what is the spirit that you're attempting to, to, to conjure up? Did you shoot Robert Adam in that series? I did. Yes. Lovely man. I remember that photograph.

21:58And I remember thinking about it because I want, I think this is a really interesting thing that you're talking about. This idea of the architect's intention, the photographer's intention, the viewer's intention. This idea of a perceptual kind of network or field as being intrinsic in a way to the identity of architectural space. And I've been nursing a kind of theoretical position about what constitutes architecture. That's, that's determinedly not Pebsnerian, not about anything, not, not linking a theater versus a bus station, but it's also not gratuitous and promiscuous in the, in the kind of everything's architecture sort of way.

22:37Yeah. Around the idea of the perception of the public as crit, as the critical missing dimension. But I remember looking at that photograph of, of Robert Adam and thinking how fascinating it was for the beautiful photograph. If I remember rightly, he stood at his drawing board and he's got a pencil in his hand. Yeah. And there's, and there's, and I don't know if I've embellished this in my mind, um, over the years, um, there's like stuff from his sharpened pencil and stuff like that kicking about. And I remember thinking, this is really interesting that the architect is, you're giving the architects this opportunity to kind of construct themselves.

23:15Yeah. Yeah. This is a very, it was a very early 2000s moment, right? Kind of pluralistic and post-post-modern and, and so on. That must've been quite fun to give the architects that opportunity. Well, it was kind of fun and kind of scary because it was quite exposing both for the citizen and the photographer because we didn't really have a template to, to, to, to, to base it on. It hadn't been attempted in a photojournalistic style in that way before.

23:46I mean, there are lots of very grand photographs of, of architects, you know, lining the walls of Portland plays. Um, there's a very particular way about thinking about, um, um, you know, the great talent that, that has that sort of monolithic quality that, and what I wanted to do, and we did them very quickly. I didn't want the opportunity to manage and manner the photographs to slip in literally into the question of what have we got?

24:19How quickly can we make it? Because in making it quickly, there was, we would reduce the possibilities of the kind of control that you exert either as an architect or as a photographer to, to sort of embellish and overwrought the process. So, and one of the big complaints of, of the, the photographic series, and I'll own up to this was that everything looked too tidy, but when you look at the photographs, they're incredibly messy, but what's pulls them together.

24:49Is this, is the, is the visual language of the photograph, which is very architectural because I'm working with perspective control. Um, you know, um, you know, I'm referencing, um, you know, the Dutch school or any number of architectural photographs going back 150 years where a camera with perspective control has been used. So everything is upright, everything is very organized, everything looks in its place, which is a trick you can only really pull off.

25:22I think with a perspective control lens, because with a fixed lens camera, everything distorts, you know, you start getting things converging and your, your brain starts looking for a, um, a mismatch in the pattern. But with an architectural photograph, when you're working with these very rigorously controlled perspectives, everything seems to make sense. Things, things are in their place. Um, and I, this is one of the reasons I haven't been able to abandon, um, you know, that conceit in the way of making architectural photographs.

25:59I mean, I would love to be much more, uh, uh, situation and moment responsive, but in order to do that in a way that also implies that the architect has everything under control is really difficult. Yeah. And one of the things that, um, sort of predicates all my architectural work is that I'm very conscious that my architects need to work. You know, they need to feed themselves, they need to feed their offices.

26:31So we have to ask ourselves, what are these architectural photographs being made for? And I think over the 45 years I've been doing this, I think the answer to that is part of what we're attempting to do is reassure a non-architectural audience that what they're going to get is competent and thoughtful and capable of care. And that the best way to, um, get people to accept that idea sort of uncritically is to make a perfect photograph because everything will look like it's supposed to be there and that it's doing the function it's supposed to do.

The discipline of attention

27:13Can you speak a little bit more to this idea of care, this photography of care? I'm very interested in the, the ethical foundations. And I think listening to you talk about your family background, there is clearly a, loosely speaking, a very pro-human component to what you do. How does photography and a kind of ethical deportment correspond as you see it beyond, I suppose, your obligations and your desires for your clients?

27:44Well, that, you know, that is, you know, both askew and perceptive. I mean, I think what you're asking me to do is, is, is understand what I mean by care or what we mean by care. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, from where I'm sat. So I see your photographs in lots of places. And as you have described, there's a real precision in their construction. And I would describe that as a generosity towards the building and towards the architect and towards the perceiver, the viewer.

28:17Is this what you mean? Like there's a, a sense of, it's sort of elegance or honorableness to it. Well, that was a very beautiful thought. I wish I was that skilled and that, that, that deep. What, what, what can I say? I don't think care is a sentimentality. All right. I don't think it's, I don't think that's what I'm talking about. I think it's a discipline of attention. It's, it's about the quality of responsibility that you're prepared to bring to the process.

28:50Because, you know, it's, it's not just the building. It's not just the architect's intention. And it's, I don't know, I suppose, it's not really even what the building is doing or who it's doing it for. It's, it's, it's being conscious and trying to respond to all of those things at once. So I suppose when I talk about care, it's a kind of, it's a global ambition to, to respond to not just the immediate needs or sales or marketing or magazine deadlines, or it's to understand the role that the building plays in its community.

29:27And over its lifetime, and over its lifetime, and over its lifetime, and the things that it may, you know, its benefits, and its failings. So, you know, if you ask me what I think, you know, care corresponds to, it's, it's that I would, I would venture. That, that's, that, that would be where I would put it in my heart. I mean, I've, I've been teaching workshops recently. And I, what I've found is I've learned enormous amounts about what I mean by my in photography.

30:00Um, and if I were to encapsulate it in the thought, what I'm attempting to do is connect my heart to my eye. Um, and to do that in generous is a good word. Kind is another good word, you know, not, not to be not critical, but, but to allow your analysis to be hopeful. So that what we're looking for is, um, those moments in an architecture where you are most conscious of the thoughtfulness and the, uh, the care, um, that's gone into its construction.

30:44I mean, you know, it's, it's such an extraordinary thing that we do making buildings and they're so elaborate and, uh, difficult to deliver that they also deliver them in a spirit, a fundamental spirit of a desire to make people's lives better. It's just extraordinary. It's extraordinary to me that, that, that, that an architect could, could both wish and achieve that in a built form is miraculous.

31:16Yeah. I mean, it, it speaks to an extraordinary power to bring together so many competing forces and to do it with love. It just, that is an extraordinary capacity. I don't think we talk about it enough. I mean, architects seem to be lost at the moment. They talk about their lack of value and, and, and as though, you know, their hourly rate was some way of, of, of evaluating any profession's value. But, you know, I think my process as a photographer is to respect all the hopes and the dreams and the wishes and to attempt in the photographs to manifest some small portion of why it might be worth investing in those things.

32:00And, um, not always understood because my, my, my work, I don't think is particularly shiny. It's not, it's not the sort of thing that you'd expect to find in the zine. Um, I, I, I, I hope my work has a, has a rigor about it that means that it needs to be approached with a different mindset.

Digital clarity and emotional resonance

32:19I want to come back to this idea of the atmospheric in your work. And you've talked a little earlier about that, this idea that if you were to photograph one building over 365 days, you would have to approach it in 365 different ways, which I think is really, really engaging. And it, and it sort of, to me, seems to situate your photography or your photographic eye and imagination closer to sort of a Yohani Pulasma-like phenomenology. Like you're trying to get into the material and the embodied character of the buildings themselves.

32:55So beyond the kind of social context, I mean, not beyond it in, in fundamentally, but beyond the kind of habitational or use function of buildings. It's trying to get into the, the haptic and the tactile and the sensory sensual to use Henri Lefebvre, which I think is really interesting. I mean, how do you square that circle that, you know, in, for someone like Pulasma, ocular centrism of which photography is an increasingly large part, this idea of the preferencing of the eye and the visual.

33:27It would seem to me to be the antithesis, photography would seem to be the antithesis of a kind of phenomenological material engagement. How do you frame a photograph or a portfolio of photographs about a building to get towards that kind of sense of the substance of a building? And just following that, I was thinking the other day about a talk I gave in London years ago about, about coherence and incoherence. It was actually about smoking, but it was about incoherence and coherence.

34:01And it was about the idea that with the rise of the digital, we've seen a rise of clarity. And with a rise of clarity, we've seen a loss of integrity that we see too much through the digital and digital photography, particularly. We see too much with too much clarity. And that if you go back to earlier imagery around buildings, what you see is an attempt to embody the spirit of the place, the genius loci, but not necessarily the details of the thing itself. Does that make sense?

34:33Yeah, it makes perfect sense. How do we, how do you, in this digital framing, with its capacity for unbelievable refinement of an image, unbelievable freshness in a way, how do you kind of control for that in your work? Shall we unpack that? I think we better. Because it speaks to several things. It talks, it talks to an idea that you might have as an artist for what your work might mean or might represent. And the way that you're, the making of your work would support those notions.

35:07And it also talks to the tools with which you make the work and your understanding of your tools, capacities, and limitations. And one of the great difficulties with a contemporary photograph made with an iPhone is essentially a fake. In that the algorithm that's running behind it and the equipment that you're using, the technology is so unbelievably sophisticated. I mean, you know, the equipment built into your phone, if you've got face recognition, it is doing it by building a 3D map of your face instantaneously.

35:46And that is something that it uses when it's making its photographs. So it's working out contrasts, colors, depth. It's, you know, it is more sophisticated than your eyes, I would warrant. It can see a greater detail in the shadows, greater detail in the highlights. It's doing more work than the human brain is evolved to process. So the image that it offers up is both hyper-realistic and essentially, in terms of the way that you emotionally respond to it, fake.

36:23Because you're, and this is an example I give often. When you look at a lover, say, your eye automatically, the autonomic response is to open the iris. It doesn't matter how bright or dark the day is. You're looking at something you love, your iris will automatically open. So that means that your brain understands an over-bright image with slightly shallow depth of field as a response to affection. So if I take a lens with a very wide aperture, f1.2, yeah, and I make an over-bright image, your brain immediately associates that with love, desire, and acceptance of the subject.

37:10And it's a trick we use in advertising all the time. If you look at any fashion photograph, it's an 80mm lens, a 1.2, very, very shallow depth of field, slightly over-bright. You're looking at your heart being manipulated. And that speaks to the clarity that you're talking about. If you then go back to, you know, photographers whose work are tremendously admired, people like Ezra Stoller or Irving Penn, and you're working with black and white film, and it has a contrast ratio.

37:40The difference between what it understands as a deep black and a bright white might be eight stops. That is to say, you know, if your shadow, your deep shadow has got two units of light in it, the next, as the camera thinks it, the next tonal grade will be four, and then eight, and then 16, then 32, then 64, then 128. That is, you know, those are the grades of your tonality. And you can sort of muck with them with processing. You can extend or compress that.

38:11But it means that you will have, you'll either lose detail in your highlights, or you will lose your detail in your shadows. And that will produce a very particular kind of photograph. And they tend to be much more emotive photographs, because what you're looking at is a sort of the bones of the composition, the bones of the world that you're looking at. So there's a part of your brain that's assembling itself within that image, and accepting these very rudimentary physical elements that you're being grafted.

38:45You know, it's like a line drawing. So it's simplifying things that your brain probably understands as quite complicated. So it means when you look at, well, I don't know, that famous photograph of the steps and the cathedral, when you stand there, you don't see that at all, because the shadows are full of light, because it's stone, and there are big windows. So you're not as aware of the indents of where the feet are, or how the light changes when you go through the doorways.

39:18And those are things that, by increasing the contrast and removing the detail, the photograph can power your relationship to that situation.

39:31So knowing all those things as a photographer, you know, you've got, I mean, I have so much control. You know, I like to, when I photograph an interior, if it's got a white wall, I want it to be white. But I could also dive into the histogram, flip my S-curve, get a really desaturated, totally absent of any contrast image, and then tip in, say, a little bit of yellow, maybe a little bit of cyan, treat it like a watercolor or a painting.

40:08You know, I can construct a completely different emotion. So, to get back to your original question, you know, if what you're interested in is making a photograph for the retina, you know, for Instagram, then there are simple tricks that you employ to make an Instagram-ready photograph. But that photograph will not be dealing with temperature, sound, I don't know, weight, scale, resistance, smell, how you felt when you walked up those stairs. Your memory, you know, those are things that you have to be prepared to engage with in a very different spirit.

40:53And I think when I say, if I photograph a building over 365 days, the shadow will never drop in the same place. It can't. It just can't, even if I were to wish it to. It's 21st of June, it's going to be here. 21st of December, it's going to be there. And that building, you know, that sort of temporal idea of how the building exists under those conditions, you really ought to be photographing it on every day. It's kind of the only, to use your word noble, I don't know, it's the only honest way to engage with that architecture.

41:31It existed on a rainy day, on a sunny day, it exists in the night. So I think one of the difficulties with photography is that essential deceit. It's just saying that that photograph is the photograph. Yeah. Because the building may be lived in, I don't know, if it's a house, it might be lived in by eight people over 40 years. Yeah. But it might be and live in the imagination of eight million people if it's an important house. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, that's a responsibility.

42:07I feel like I've wandered off track here. No, not at all. Well, I think it leads quite nicely. I mean, I think it's an incredibly rich description that you've come up with. And I think it opens lots of doors to ways of thinking about this. And the power that it seems to afford the photographer is fascinating to me. I mean, we increasingly consume architecture through photographs. And there's an interesting discussion around virtuality in architecture. Architecture is always virtual, always a thing that is becoming.

42:40And that the photographer has this major role to play in that process. For example, I've never been to see the Guggenheim in Bilbao by Frank Gehry, but I know it very well. And I know it because of the photography that has communicated what Frank Gehry and the development authority who commissioned it wanted to communicate. And you do increasingly see, it would appear to me, buildings designed with, quote unquote, a kind of social media moment that can be grabbed.

43:10But case in point being, of course, the painting of the Brutalist spiral staircase at the Queen Elizabeth Center on the South Bank, Dennis Lasden's, I think it is, painted yellow to create an Instagram moment so that people tag it and it kind of trends in social media. I think that's all that's for. So the photographer seems now to have this kind of intrinsic role to the production of design. Have you found that in your work, that there is a sense that you are seen as a member in a way of the design team, that your eye and your communication of the building is part of the goal of the client itself?

Working with Sam Jacobs

43:55Oh, well, I couldn't talk to that. Go on. Hubris is wonderful. What do I think about that? Gosh, that is difficult. I mean, if we just go back to the, if we just go back to Sam's work at University of Kent and your photography of that, it seems clear to me, and this is no criticism, I think it's a really great piece of work. It seems clear to me that this is designed for the image. It's designed for its visual consumption. Yeah. Significant among which is the photograph. Well, that is an interesting, I mean, you know, obviously, you know, Sam's work on his own and with Fat.

44:30I think it's an easy accusation to make. Having worked with Sam, I would say that it's more complicated than that because I don't, I'm not sure that Sam is thinking about the photographer when he makes his work. But I do know that his work is extremely photogenic. I mean, I was working for him yesterday. I had part of the reason I'm so, I've been up at four o'clock every morning this week working in 40 degrees.

45:03My brain is scrambled.

45:06Sam, I love working with Sam, but it is exhausting because there's a photograph every step. And it's very particular to the way that he thinks, the way that he plays with space, his capacity to build narrative and have fun to make association, to draw in materials and textures and unexpected arrangements of things. So that, you know, on the building I was photographing, he's got three columns.

45:40He's got a steel one. It's just an I-beam stuck in the ground. He's got a concrete one, which is safe from the building that was originally on the site. And he's got an upturned tree sitting on a lump of rock because Avebury's just down the road. And you get it. You get it instantly. It's kind of, it's a bit obvious. It's a bit silly, but it's also a very sort of warm thing to do.

46:10He's not afraid to play a game that people can access. You know, he's not, you know, he hasn't grown that sort of academic skin that kind of becomes very pure and has a tendency to sort of distill and create distance because it starts talking to very, very slender areas of ephemera and debate. You know, he will make things that encourages you in. And part of the joy of that is there are always interesting associations to make with the planes of the building because, you know, it'll be, you know, the light will be thrilling and, you know, the form will suddenly become exciting from, you know, one corner to another.

47:01So all of those things are great things to play with the photographer. And I'm not sure that he's building it to make great photographs. I think he's building it to make a great experience for the people who, because if it's working for the photographer, it's certainly going to work for the people who move through the building. And there are, you know, Terry Farrell. I always used to say, you know, Jim Sterling, there's almost a brass plaque on the floor. Enjoy it from here.

47:26Because, wow, you know, there's so much going on from here. You're just going to have, you know, whereas with some of the more sort of visually restrained works, you know, when you're working for Foster or, you know, Nick during the sort of high tech moments, what you were looking for was how those games were being played out in the structure.

47:57You know, out where, you know, Peter Rice had found a really exciting way to put things together. And, you know, so there are other languages that are going on that may not necessarily be about providing a useful photograph, but the photograph will find them because they are, do you see what I mean? I think it's just really interesting that the phrase you used about Sam's work, I think Sam's work and Charles Rennie McIntosh's work and Chamberlain Powell and Bonn and Lekitonov as hell, they just seem to like people and their architecture seems to me to be about.

48:32It's not ironic. It's not, it might be humorous, but it's not sardonic. It's not in any way distancing itself from the public. But I was interested in this idea of you talking about his work and you saying that you want to unpack the journey of the architecture in a way you place yourself in the position of the viewer who knows nothing about the architecture and communicate that. Is that part of the role, of course? You want to be, in a way, ignorant of... No, I'm so much more conceited than that.

49:04What I want to do... I think it can be both things at the same time, by the way. What I want to do is place the viewer in the perfect place that they would be standing if they knew a little bit about the building. Okay. Yeah, do you know, when you see people walk through a building and obviously you get into a reception, you're looking for your way in, your way out, where the lifts are, where the toilets are, where the reception desk is. You're not, you know, there's a lot of information arriving all at once. But if you move to the left and directly face the reception desk, you would then have a better understanding of the height of the room, the way the light is coming in from the window on the left.

49:46You're not the choice of the furniture because it will be resolving itself against the main function of the room in a way that only a plan would allow you to understand. Yeah. Because, you know... So, by just moving to the left a little bit, you would experience the architecture in a very different way. You know, I used to say that so much, I'm just a very elaborate furniture mover. You know, it's just to create those little vignettes so that you understand that everything has been placed in a very beautiful way out of intention.

50:20No, I think that word intention is really good. Communicating the intention. I think that's really an important thing. The intention to make architecture, again, it's coming back to this thing I've been knocking around in my head about, like, what constitutes architecture. And I think the intention to make architecture is one of the prerequisites of architecture.

Defining architectural intention

50:39That's such a fascinating question, isn't it? What do you and I understand by the idea of architecture? Because, you know, I can make a shed. I've made sheds. You know, I can build things. I can stack a row of stones. You know, I go to the beach. I'll instantly make a tower of stones. There's an innate human desire to do all of those things. Architecture is when you use everything that you know and apply it to that problem to make something better than was expected.

51:10I think.

51:12You know, because it's very easy to make mean-spirited, mendacious, bland, inoffensive things that keep people warm and dry. It takes a very different spirit to also make a place where people want to be. Yeah. But on the face of it, they may be, you know, if you deconstructed the actual physicality of the projects, they might be exactly the same thing. Made out of the same materials to the same dimensions. But one will be architecture and the other one will be something else.

51:45And I think that responds to that idea of intent. You know, are you just trying to make a quick buck and run away? Or are you trying to improve the quality of people's lives? And one takes a different kind of investment than the other. And I'm not entirely sure that it's always a conscious choice. It just may be, you know, the materials that people have got to do, you know, because the curse of my life is growing up in a household full of fully functioning brains who really wanted to improve the world.

52:19I mean, that's a curse, really, because it's such a rare set of circumstances when you look at the conditions that humanity tends to live. It's just a very rare and special place. Yeah. Back to your earlier question. I mean, I don't think you can condemn a still photograph to being merely optical. It's kind of, it's flat, but it's not inert.

52:50So I think what I'm learning about myself during this conversation, which maybe I should have had with you over a pint so I was more organized, is that I don't want it to be a picture of an object. I want it to be evidence of an encounter. Does that distinction, would you recognize that? Yeah. I think there is something also in the kind of, when you were talking about how you understand architecture,

53:21I was thinking there's a wonderful building near where I live, Pugin's, St. Augustine's at Ramsgate. Yeah. And it's an exquisite piece of work. It's just extraordinary. Complete, a complete, I love complete architecture. Yeah. You know, like Arnie Jacobson's St. Catherine's College at Oxford. It's just complete. All the way down to the door handles and it's magical. Yeah. Yeah. And I was thinking about the way that architects, that what architecture can do is it can transfigure materials

53:52and make them more beautiful than nature made them. Wow. Which I think is kind of interesting. Like a tree is an intrinsically beautiful thing, but you take that oak or you take that mahogany or you take that wood and you shape it and you form it into furniture. You carve it, you smooth it, you oil it, whatever you do to it. And the tree is made more than itself in that process. Or a piece of stone which is buried in the ground for millions of years is taken out and carved and shaped and smoothed and catches light.

54:25Or even light itself is filtered through glass, coloured glass, warped glass, you know, whatever it is. And the light itself is made more beautiful than light itself. And I think that that's kind of, for me, it's a very kind of highfalutin way of thinking about what the architect's role is. But, like, that's kind of it. And it takes human action, the gathering together of people in space, and it makes it more than it is. It frames it, like to use the Leon Krier kind of idea, it frames it and adds an essential dignity to its mundaneness, its everydayness.

55:04And I think, for me, your photography and the way you've described it seems to me to be about also trying to get to that, which is, like, how have they taken these ordinary things, concrete, steel, glass, wood, and how have they transfigured them into something that is more than that, more than that combination? I don't know. Maybe that's too much.

Camera craft versus algorithms

55:23No, no, it's not. Well, it is both too much and not quite enough. Stop me if I have got this wrong, because it seems to run with a thought that I'm pretty much constantly having.

55:39One of the agonies of making photographs is that I'm very aware that what I'm responding to is something I can never capture. It's always just beyond my capacity, the capacity of the camera. It's a felt but unseen or perhaps unseeable thing. And there is this other sense, it's very romantic, and I think wrong on many, many levels.

56:16This idea that life, human life, is a way for the universe to achieve consciousness, you know, for the universe to witness itself. And it seems to me that part of your argument would be that if you were the universe and you wanted to be made aware of your extraordinary structure, you know, in the very, very, very limited way that we as human beings perceive it,

56:47it would seem to me a perfectly natural thing to then go, wow, look what we can do. I can combine all of these things that I sense, that I feel that I am aware of, and I can express it in exquisite carvings or magnificent paintings. It would seem to me a perfectly logical part of that process, because I'm always, always aware that I'm such a fundamental being. I'm just not sophisticated enough to get through to what's actually being said to me.

57:20I'm just a bit too stupid constantly to grasp it. I don't know if that's true, but I'll take your word for it.

57:32I'll ask Lorna.

57:36Can you imagine what I could have done? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, and part of that process is the hope that you'll do better tomorrow. Yeah. You know, you keep on committing yourself to that challenge. I mean, I should be 65 this year. I want another 65 years. I'm not even close to getting enough, pulling together enough sort of intellectual resources to start making the kind of work that I think needs to be made.

58:06It's just so difficult. Yeah, God. So what's the truthful architectural photograph in a world saturated by bloody awful images, algorithmic cameras, and people taking photographs of great works of architecture. And then putting a filter on them, for goodness sake. I caught one of my students who'd gone all the way to the States and taken photographs of Louis Kahn's architecture, and then put a filter on it. I was like, sorry, who do you think you are? Yes.

58:37So what is a truthful photograph now? I asked the camera what the camera wanted to be, and it said a mechanism for a filter. All right. See, the way I tend to think about photographers, in my mind, there are two photographers. There are only two photographers. There is the photographer who is the camera operator. They are being used by the algorithm to produce a photograph.

59:09You know, it's got very little to do with the photographer. You're pointing the camera. The camera goes click. It makes a bunch of assessments about what it's looking at, and it produces a result. And there you are. And they can be very pleasant photographs, because the photographer might be having a really interesting life. You look at them, and you think, wow, great photograph. No. Great technological trick. It's a conceit. It's like, you know, I'm not a good driver.

59:40I'm not a Formula One standard. I'm not. But my car will get me 30,000 miles a year without a serious accident, because it is so sophisticated. It will make me look like I'm competent. But all I'm doing is using the tool in the way that the tool is designed to be used and getting an acceptable result. And that is one kind of photographer. And then there's the other kind of photographer, when you see their portfolio, what you are conscious of is what they used to call camera craft.

1:00:12It's the capacity to use the equipment to make an expression of your heart and your mind, your intellect, your aesthetic joint judgments. And that's quite a difficult thing to do, because you have to play with all of the things that a photographer has to play with nowadays. You know, the chip, the lens, the software, and arrive at a way of thinking and seeing the world that is pertinent to you, and then reproduce it.

1:00:44You know, it's not a happy accident. It's something that you can do day in, day out, day in, day out, because you've achieved camera craft. And I guess a lot of that's got to do with intent, again, what it is you're trying to say and why, and how much trouble you're prepared to go to, to have that conversation. You know, you know, wandered off again.

1:01:09I'm loving your questions. It's great. I'm stretching muscles I haven't had to use for years. Well, I'm sort of mesmerized by it, actually, in a way. To a certain extent, I hadn't kind of, I hadn't considered a lot of what you're talking about. And I particularly like this idea of the craft of it, the craftedness of it. Yeah. Do you still play around with analog, or is there no space for that? I make photographs every day.

1:01:39Who do you? Um, this is, this is the camera I use when I go dog walking, um, make pictures in my forest because, because, you know, this idea of 10,000 hours to, to produce a master in craft. And if you think about the work that people like Beethoven or Mozart were making towards the end of their lives, that they could only have expressed because they'd spent the entirety of their lives beforehand making the work. I mean, you know, Bach, particularly to me, it just has such an astonishing resonance because, you know, you, you are so conscious of his presence in, in the work and his capacity to play with the form.

1:02:26And that only comes with, you know, a really powerful intellect functioning and all 12 cylinders, but also the craft of having been doing it for long enough for those pennies to drop. You know, the, the way the, the way the human brain works, you have to travel a path dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of times just to get the wiring to line up in the correct direction to, to be able to exploit that knowledge. You know, it's not, it's not accessible at your fingertips when you're born.

1:02:59Ergo, you have to learn it. And the only way to learn it is by putting in the hard work. So, yeah. It's hard work. It is hard work. It is very hard work.

Discovering through play

1:03:12You make it sound very rewarding. I mean, I do love doing it, but, you know, I, I'll also tell you, I haven't done a day's work in my life. You know, I, I think I'm, well, I, I hope, I think one of the conceits and anyone, any of my assistants will tell you it's a lie, is that I'm playing. I'm, I'm discovering through play. I think if I, if you arrive at the work with too rigid a set of ideas, you, you won't find anything of value.

1:03:43That's a great point to finish on. Thank you, Tim. That was really wonderful. It's been a great pleasure. He trapped clouds in bottles the way kids trap grasshoppers. Then one misty day, he was stopped by the windshield. Behind him, an avenue of trees. Before him, the mirror of that scene. He seemed to enter what, in fact, he left. That's from Erica Jong's poem, Narcissus, Photographer, from 1971. I mean no offence, Tim, of course, but it's an irresistible couple of verses. See the podcast description for links to Tim on his website and on the socials,

1:04:14and to ways you might be pleased to support the podcast. And thanks for listening.