Ten years of weddings and portraits left me with a lot of habits that survived the move into architectural work, and exactly one that did not: pointing the camera wherever the subject was. A building is not a person. Tilt the camera up to fit a six-story brick facade on Lexington Avenue into the frame […]
A property manager in Dutchess County asked me why the north side of his building “always looks flat in the photos” and whether I could come back at golden hour and fix it. The honest answer is that a north-facing wall in the Hudson Valley never receives direct sun during the months anyone wants to […]
Eleven in the morning on a July Tuesday in Atlanta, scaffolding up the east face of a 1912 commercial block, and the survey lead asks me why the photographs from the upper lifts look like they were taken through wax paper. They were, in a sense. I travel with a facade restoration survey team and […]
I spent four years as a mason’s tender before I ever held a camera professionally, hauling brick and mixing mud on jobs around north Florida, and the thing that still bothers me about most masonry photography is that it flattens the work into wallpaper. A brick wall photographed at midday is a repeating pattern of […]
My father-in-law ran flatwork crews for thirty years and the first thing he told me when I started photographing pours was that concrete lies to a camera for about two weeks. He was right, and it took me a full summer in Jacksonville to understand why. A slab that looks perfect at four in the […]