They chase the perfect light, the perfect angle from which to shoot. Then they have to be sure that the janitor doesn’t leave a trash can near the front door or that the window washer won’t be clambering down the facade when–oops!–the shutter clicks.
At worst, they construct a mask that hides a building’s faults, making it appear handsome instead of hideous, welcoming rather than intimidating. But when the building is truly great–and when they do their job right–the result can be gorgeous, even epoch-defining: the Chrysler Motors pavilion at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair looking as sleek as a streamlined train, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house in Bear Run, Pa., seemingly hovering over a stream, an unfinished Sears Tower rising like a mountain into the prairie sky.
They are architectural photographers, in particular the ones at the enormously talented Chicago firm Hedrich Blessing. You’ve probably never heard of them. But this is Chicago, not the Left Coast or the Right Coast; in these parts, we’re not supposed to equate a lack of celebrity with a lack of artistry. And make no mistake, there are artists at Hedrich Blessing, photographers who are every bit as creative as the architects whose work they record, perhaps more so. They are, in fact, so good at what they do that run-of-the-mill architects sometimes beseech them to wave their magic wand, saying in effect, “Please, oh, please, turn my frog of a building into a prince.”
Starting next Saturday, and running through July 9, the Chicago Historical Society will present more than 500 of Hedrich Blessing’s princely pictures in a sprawling exhibition titled “Building Images: Seventy Years of Hedrich Blessing Photography.” The show, designed by Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, is a “don’t miss,” and I can say that without having even seen it.
Why? Because there’s also a new book out about Hedrich Blessing (“Building Images: Seventy Years of Photography at Hedrich Blessing,” Chronicle), and flipping through it is like watching a make-believe parade of buildings that made Chicago a renowned center of design innovation. Even better, the book is sprinkled with lively anecdotes from Hedrich Blessing photographers past and present about what they went through to make these pictures. There also is the occasional perfectly imperfect image, such as the dusk shot that shows an old junker of a car parked in front a sleek ballet rehearsal hall in Oklahoma City.
“We were trying desperately to get the old car moved from in front of the building, because the sunset was tremendous . . . and fading,” recalls Hedrich Blessing’s Bob Shimer, one of the 11 photographers now at the firm, in the book. “So we shot anyway. In reality, the car represents well the privations of the neighborhood, as well as the hardships that dancers endure to pursue their art.”
To be sure, Hedrich Blessing’s photographers are not the only ones who have achieved skyscraper-like stature. In New York, for example, there’s the redoubtable–and far more celebrated–Ezra Stoller, who in the middle years of the 20th Century was so skilled at making bad buildings look good that someone even coined a verb for the incredible transformations he could work; architectural mediocrities were said to have been “Stollerized.”
Yet Hedrich Blessing opened for business a decade earlier than Stoller did, and, in the view of some critics, it may have been more influential in defining how architectural photographers practice their art and craft. Hedrich Blessing’s photographs pioneered the approach of reaching beyond the obvious “facts” of a building–the site, the materials, the form, the function–and digging deeper, burrowing right to the core of the architect’s vision. “We don’t make photographs, we think them,” the late founder of the studio, Ken Hedrich, once said.
Hedrich and partner Henry Blessing started the firm at the end of 1929, not exactly an auspicious time, given that, a few weeks earlier, the stock market had crashed and large-scale building would soon come to a virtual halt. No matter. Hedrich had talent and a sense of style; he dressed in a full suit and white starched shirts. Most important, he had the right connections.
His early work impressed the Chicago architect John W. Root Jr., principal of the distinguished Chicago firm Holabird & Root. In 1930, Root gave Hedrich his first major assignment, a chance to make the classic “down the canyon” view of Holabird’s new Chicago Board of Trade building. The picture still delivers a knockout punch because it’s taken at just the right time–when nearly all the buildings along LaSalle Street are cast in an almost-black shadow and the sun-washed Board of Trade bursts above them, a magic mountain.
Blessing left for California in 1931, but the firm retained his name, probably because the Depression made printing new stationery out of the question. The firm prospered anyway. Even though Hedrich wasn’t the official photographer for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, Root still encouraged him to shoot the firm’s work, including the Chrysler Motors pavilion. The resulting images perfectly captured both the Depression Moderne architecture of the fair and the more intangible theme that the exposition represented a futuristic world of tomorrow–utterly different from the classically inspired World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, held 40 years before in Jackson Park.
Hedrich’s ability to capture what could not be seen–the idea behind the building–was the real revolution, as author Tony Hiss, who writes and lectures on how people experience their surroundings, explains in the book. Up until Hedrich, architectural photographers merely sought to document the physical reality of a building, even such details as the “Admission 10” sign in front of the fair’s famous House of Tomorrow. But Hedrich uncluttered things and enabled viewers to grasp both the building and the concept from which it sprang.
He learned, Hiss writes, “to make two minds visible within the same picture: the mind of the photographer and the mind of the architect whose building he was photographing. The photographer became a relay point, a revealer of the architect’s innermost purposes; the ‘design intent’ is what Nick Merrick, a contemporary Hedrich Blessing photographer, calls it. For Jon Miller, another of the firm’s photographers, it’s the ‘Big Idea.’ “
More work came in, and soon the clients included Frank Lloyd Wright, who in a remote part of western Pennsylvania had “some house,” as Hedrich family lore tells it, that he wanted photographed. It was indeed some house, perhaps the greatest house of the 20th Century, an astonishing mass of fieldstone and concrete that brazenly cantilevered over a waterfall.
Ken Hedrich, too busy at the time shooting Wright’s Taliesin compound in southern Wisconsin, handed off the job to his brother Bill. So Bill Hedrich schlepped to Bear Run, Pa., and found the perfect angle–but to get it, he had to buy waders that enabled him to walk into the middle of a very cold stream. At first, Wright snippily pronounced the photograph “acrobatic.” But, as Bill Hedrich, now 88 and living in Tucson, Ariz., writes in the book, the photograph later became Wright’s favorite view of the house and is thought to have given it the name “Fallingwater.”
Maybe things really did happen that way. Maybe they didn’t. But the story has a ring of truth. For throughout the decades, from the modernism of the postwar era to the postmodernism of the 1980s to the off-kilter deconstructivist designs of today, Hedrich Blessing’s pictures have had the remarkable effect of freeze-framing our view of countless designs, communicating their Big Ideas in a way that the architecture alone never could.
So we can forgive Hedrich Blessing for making such clunkers as the Museum of Contemporary Art look better than they really are. Buildings offer the illusion that they are permanent and unchanging, but in the end it is the medium of photography that often creates the most lasting impression of them. And Hedrich Blessing has been an essential messenger in spreading the gospel of good design.
