LIGHTING MASTER
Durston Saylor Lights up a Room
In the rarified, refined world of architectural interiors, lighting is a “make it or break it” proposition. According to Durston Saylor— who has photographed some of the world’s most sumptuous spaces for clients such as Architectural Digest, Time Magazine, The New York Times, Ralph Lauren, The Ritz Carleton, Rizzoli, and countless architects and interior designers — “lighting creates a visual narrative about a space, a believable story about the room and its inhabitants.
“Lighting should also invite you into a space and lead you through it,” Saylor emphasizes. “It should create allure; evoke a mood; bring out the room’s best features; reveal its colors, lines, and textures; and conceal its flaws — all without overpowering the lighting designs of the architects and interior designers who have left their visual imprint on the space long before the photographer arrives on the scene.”
When Saylor does arrive at the well-appointed residences of high-end homeowners such as Dick and Lynn Cheney, Madonna, Liv Ullman, Claudia Schiffer, and Ralph Lauren, cruising up to the curb in a capacious black 1996 Lincoln Town Car sporting New Jersey plates, he never fails to elicit a double take from the architects, designers, and art directors who await him.
“It’s one of those old-fashioned Town Cars that looks like something an undertaker or a Mafioso would drive — with a trunk big enough to stuff a body into.
“I determine what I bring to a job by what fits in the trunk of this monster,” he quips. “My car is like a governor for me. If I can’t get it into the car, that’s enough stuff. It’s a way of capping that neurotic process of bringing more and more equipment as insurance against disaster. If we photographers miss a shot, we fantasize about the equipment that we’ll need to bring next time to keep that from happening again, so the equipment we carry tends to grow exponentially. One stock photographer I know drives around to all of his locations with a cherry picker. At some point, you have to draw the line.”
The surprises continue as Saylor pops the trunk of his black behemoth to reveal the tools of his trade. Although this East Coast architectural photographer does his share of lighting with Profoto strobes and other conventional photographic lighting tools, a survey of the trunk’s contents also reveals an abundance of lighting implements more likely to be found on a hardware store shelf. Items like incandescent light bulbs and household ceiling fixtures that Saylor has modified with extension cords.
These low-tech lighting tools reveal a lot about Saylor’s lighting philosophy. Above all, he is a master of restraint — a characteristic that he considers to be essential for any architectural photographer.
“I have to remember that I’m there partly as a documentarian,” Saylor stresses. “It’s not like the patient is sick when I get to the job. Most of the spaces that I’m hired to photograph are already pretty beautiful. So my approach is somewhat like the Hippocratic oath: ‘First, do no harm.’ My initial responsibility is to do no damage to the scene — to light it in a way that I haven’t spoiled what is beautiful about it already. I am there to direct the viewer’s attention around the picture, to dig out the latent poetry that may be in a room, and to work hand in hand with architects and designers to make their intentions clear.
“A good deal of my lighting has to do with preserving some of the room’s inherent mystery,” he adds. “Lives have a way of seeping into a room over time. A photographer and writer named Wright Morris published a book called ‘The Inhabitants’ in the 1940s, which has influenced me tremendously. It’s about the way that the lives of people rub off on their environments, the way that a chair comes to conform to the body that sits in it every day, the way that the values of people have a way of osmosing into the physical spaces that they inhabit. A lot of my lighting has to do with trying to convey that sense of a room’s inhabitants, about being able to capture the space so that this pregnant fullness is preserved. And that’s why I use the low-wattage stuff, why I use things from the hardware store. I don’t want to blow what’s already there; I want to emphasize it. By using incandescent sources and long exposures, I can maintain the inherent delicacy of the lighting in a room. If I use strobes and short exposures, the room will very often begin to look artificially lit.
“Lighting can also focus the experience of looking,” he continues. “Lighting should function like a guide on an architectural tour: it should usher you into a room and guide you through it. There is a first level of things noticed, a second level, and so on. By establishing a hierarchy with my lighting, I can create a coherent experience for the viewer. It’s an ordering of the chaos within the frame of an image.”
Over the course of a career that has spanned more than two decades, this thoughtful, artful approach to lighting interiors has earned Saylor a well-deserved reputation for rich, inviting, atmospheric images with a strong sense of place.
The path that led to Saylor’s success as an architectural photographer was a circuitous one. His first commercial experience was as a forensic photographer at a crime lab in California, while he was still a student majoring in photography at a West Coast art school. In 1979, the 25-year old Philadelphia native headed back East and set up shop in New York City, where he jokes that he “gained valuable experience in portraiture during a brief stint as a photographer in a Santa Claus suit” at a New York department store. After signing a lease on a fifth-floor walk-up in a tenement building on 16th Street, he eked out a living working as a freelance photo assistant.
A job shooting Oriental rugs for a friend sparked Saylor’s interest in shooting interiors. After working as an assistant for a successful architectural photographer, he began shooting small assignments of his own for architects, interior designers, and editorial clients such as House & Garden, Interiors Magazine, and New York Magazine. But it was a chance meeting during a weekend on Fire Island in 1983 — when Saylor befriended an architect who later hired him to shoot a series of architectural projects — that truly established him as an architectural photographer. The collaboration yielded images that were eventually published in Architectural Digest. By the mid-eighties, Saylor was shooting regularly for the magazine, as well as for Architectural Record and Architecture Magazine. His willingness to “go to the mat” on every job (he often spent 18 hours lighting and shooting an interior, lugging his equipment up five flights of stairs when he arrived back home in the wee hours) earned him the respect of many of his early clients, who have remained loyal even as his day rate has quadrupled.
Today, Saylor shoots at least a dozen assignments a year for Architectural Digest, and, after 18 years of working for the magazine, enjoys permanent billing on its masthead. His other clients include prominent architecture and design firms, as well as international and national hotels. Saylor’s photographs have appeared in more than 30 books on architecture and interiors, and his talent for capturing the essence of a space has garnered him assignments all over the world — in locations as far-flung as Venice, Rome, Zurich, Paris, London, Kuwait, and Istanbul.
PDN: What do you strive for when you’re lighting interiors?
Saylor: Lighting for architectural photography should be like a well-told story, with development and resolution. There should be a hook at the beginning to bring the viewer in, something that invites greater involvement, and then something that satisfies at the end.
I also use lighting to “charge” the experience of looking at an interior, so that people will say, “Wow, this looks so great.” When I photograph show houses, I often put 85B correction gels on the windows to make the color quality of the daylight consistent with the interior lighting. When people enter the room, they are absolutely delighted because general quality of the light is different, but the effect is subtle enough that no one can put their finger on the source of the effect. That’s what I try to do with all of my lighting.
PDN: You’ve also mentioned your use of lighting to create a sense of the moment.
Saylor: There’s an emotional aspect to many spaces that helps us associate a particular space with our own experience of the world. Some spaces are morning spaces that we associate with tranquility or exhaustion or invigoration — and I can use lighting to tell the viewer: “It is morning and the day is clear, crisp, and beautiful.” Lighting can also effectively convey the sense that this is a room that one is experiencing at the very end of the day, with illumination that is low-key, suggestive, and poetic. Or perhaps I want to convey that this is a room to daydream in, and the room will not be lit from corner to corner and edge to edge.
PDN: What factors do you consider before settling on a particular lighting set-up?
Saylor: I’ll start with the practical considerations, such as: What are we are trying to accomplish with this photograph? Are we trying to engage the viewer by any means necessary? Are we marketing the services of the architect or designer? Are we trying to do a straightforward job of documenting the space?
I’ll also consider the original intentions of the architect or designer — what they were trying to achieve when they designed the space. People don’t work on these projects for years without having some pretty strong preconceptions about what my photographs should look like. I get a lot of input from interior designers.
Beyond that, I’ll try to figure out what kind of lighting is in sympathy with the space. I’ll determine whether the space will have the greatest impact and potential for connecting with the viewer as a night scene or a daytime scene.
PDN: Do you change your lighting style for different types of clients?
Saylor: Yes. You have to take your cues from the nature of the assignment. There are certain kinds of interiors, certain types of magazines, and certain applications for photographs where theatricality is welcome and wonderful. Some spaces will lend themselves to lighting pyrotechnics that would be inappropriate in a tasteful residential interior. For example, the hotel design field is much more theatrical than residential work. Yet there are exceptions: there are certain blue chip hotels where theatricality is not welcome. For an editorial client, I usually aim for more verisimilitude in my lighting.
PDN: Who are some of your creative influences?
Saylor: I’ve always loved the work of an 18th century English painter named Joseph Wright of Derby. He painted scenes in the history of English science when there was a eureka moment happening — and the lighting in these paintings…well, there are light sources that are just the most preposterous things in the world: the equivalent of light bulbs being stuck behind chairs — things that don’t make a lot of sense, but make the room beautiful.
I was also influenced by Eugene Atget’s bedroom photographs, where the bed feels so mysterious and so rich. Atget used mostly available light, but he was very good at figuring out angles and times to shoot things so that the rooms had a pregnant fullness to them — he really captured the poetic spirit of those rooms.
PDN: How has your approach to lighting changed over the years?
Saylor: When I first started shooting interiors, if a room was illuminated by 50 light bulbs in the ceiling, I would change all of the bulbs so that they were uniform. I didn’t know that there were other ways to solve this problem. I tried to anticipate and fix everything, so every day was an 18-hour workday.
Looking back, I see that I started out as a very uptight person, worrying about failure at every turn. Now I feel freer to just throw up a light to see how it looks. That’s the play component, and it’s what makes photography so interesting to me today.
Another thing that has changed is that I can now light with strobe in a much more subtle, controlled way. That was incredibly hard to get to for me. When I look at some of my old images and they make me cringe, it’s usually because of the lack of control over my strobe lighting that came from my lack of experience. I would over-light simply because the strobes were so powerful ⎯ and I tended to destroy the potential of the beauty that was already in a room.
PDN: Is there a lighting technique that you use frequently to enhance a viewer’s experience of a space?
Saylor: One of the techniques that I use a lot, which produces marvelous results, is to photograph an interior space at night and then leave everything set up until the following day, when I’ll do a short exposure to get daylight views in the windows. This gives me a beautiful relationship between the interior lighting, which feels very snuggly and beautiful like rooms do at night, but it doesn’t read as a night shot because of the daylight views in the windows.
PDN: Do you see any shifts in lighting trends in architectural photography?
Saylor: I’ve seen a shift away from highly produced, affected lighting toward either true available light (more typical in Europe) or the appearance of available light (even though the image may be extensively lit). The lighting in vogue today is not as discernible as it was in the past; it is more subtle and realistic.
PDN: How did you hone your lighting skills?
Saylor: When I became interested in pursuing a career as an architectural photographer, I began looking at architecture and interior design magazines and then calling the photographers who shot for these magazines. One of these photographers hired me as his assistant, and I benefited enormously from the experience. He taught me about color temperature, color temperature meters, filters, how to photograph a room with fluorescent and incandescent sources and not end up with horrible color. I also studied the images of other architectural photographers whose lighting I admired and then tried to sort out how it was done. As I gained experience and confidence, I began to experiment more and try out different lighting techniques.
PDN: How much of your work involves travel?
Saylor: I’m in Europe a couple of times a year and in the Caribbean at least once a year. I spend a lot of time shooting in the six zip codes for high wage earners in this part of the country: the Upper East Side, Greenwich, Westport, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Hamptons.
PDN: You’re truly meticulous about the images that you commit to, going to great lengths to show a room in its “best light.” What motivates you?
Saylor: I’m motivated by the beauty and sensuousness of the spaces that I photograph, as well as a desire to convey a sense of how it actually feels to physically inhabit a particular environment. I want my lighting to engage the mind and appeal to senses; I want the viewer to feel a space instead of simply looking at it. There are certain architectural photographers whom I truly admire, photographers whose work I have followed over the years. When I look at their images, I realize that I love the way they think. I want my images to be as thoughtful as theirs.