Wright in the Abstract

Photos © Mark Hertzberg (2022)

I had to edit 34,575 Frank Lloyd Wright building images (or 185.62 GB) down to 30 photos for an exhibit.

Here’s the backstory: Lake Forest (Illinois) College, my alma mater, honored me with two concurrent exhibits this month for my 50th anniversary Homecoming. Rebecca Goldberg, Lecturer in Art and Director of the Gallery in the Romanesque Durand Art Institute building, initially asked me just to include a handful of my Frank Lloyd Wright work in an exhibit of my career in photojournalism. I found it hard to edit the Wright work down to just four or so photos. Fortunately there was enough space in two galleries to mount two separate exhibits, each with 30 prints. I decided to pick mostly abstract interpretations of Wright’s work than show perhaps predictable building photos. My selection is below, in alphabetical order of the commissions:

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, 1956

Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 1938

Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 1938

Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 1938

Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 1943

Hillside Drafting Room, Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1933

Hollyhock House, Los Angeles, 1919

Imperial Hotel entry way, Tokyo, 1915, as rebuilt at Meiji Mura near Nagoya, Japan

Lindholm Service Station, Cloquet, Minnesota, 1956

Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California, 1957

Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California, 1957

Meyer May House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1908

Meyer May House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1908

Meyer May House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1908

Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1952

Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1952

Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1952

Romeo and Juliet Windmill, Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1898

SC Johnson Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936

SC Johnson Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936

SC Johnson Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936

SC Johnson Research Tower, Racine, Wisconsin, 1943/44

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911, 1925

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911, 1925

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911, 1925

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911, 1925

Thomas P. Hardy House, Racine, Wisconsin, 1904/05

Wingspread, Wind Point, Wisconsin, 1937

Wingspread, Wind Point, Wisconsin, 1937

Now, as for those 34,575 images…if I had time to go through them, a good chunk could be deleted. But who has time to do that?

Hours for the gallery…the show runs through October 30:

https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/majors-and-minors/art-and-art-history/art-galleries

Keep scrolling down for previous posts on the website…

Writing Wright with Light, Part Two

Photos © Mark Hertzberg

This is the last day of the Road Scholar Frank Lloyd Wright trip which I am accompanying. Today I found myself looking at shapes in the six Wright sites we visited. I relied on memory to try to not repeat photos I have taken in the past. I was challenged to turn this post into a “Where Was I When I Took This Photo?” game rather than caption photos as I normally would. The photos are presented in the order in which we visited the sites. The answers are at the bottom.

Site A:

Site B:

Site C:

Site D:

Site E:

Site F:

Answers:

A: Jacobs 1 House – The odd shaped bricks are attributed to Wright reportedly having his apprentices use bricks taken from the SC Johnson Administration Building. There are 200 shapes of bricks in the Administration Building. B: Unitarian Meeting House C: Wyoming Valley School D: Hillside School E: Hillside Drafting Room F: Taliesin

Thank you to Taliesin Preservation for greeting us at the Visitors Center with this sign:

Scroll down to see yesterday’s “Writing Wright with Light” post, and previous blog articles.

Hillside Geometry (& new Minerva Photo)

Photos © Mark Hertzberg

My cameras and I have been to Taliesin many times. My challenge at any Wright site is to photograph it with a fresh eye each visit. I was able to interpret the geometry of Wright’s “forest” in the drafting room at Hillside from a new perspective recently. I welcome your comments, unless they reopen the debate about the Foundation and the School. The treat at the end of this blog entry is my latest portrait of our dear friend Minerva, also taken Friday May 20.

As we look at the drafting tables below, the unknowns, of course, are what renderings and plans were drawn at which table, and by whom. Among countless others, one of the architects (and students) who counted this as their office was Charles Montooth, Minerva’s late husband.

Links:

https://www.taliesinpreservation.org

https://wrightinracine.wordpress.com/2021/09/29/the-marvelous-minerva-montooth/

Keep scrolling down to see earlier blog entries…

Where Famous Feet Did Tread

Photo and text © Mark Hertzberg (2021)

Procrastination sometimes pays off.

I took this photograph August 29, on a photo exploration of the Hillside Drafting Room. It’s a single frame, in a folder of 18 photos. While I was concentrating on other aspects of the drafting room, I glanced at the floor and wondered what famous people have walked on it since it was installed in late 1938. Frank Lloyd Wright was obviously one of them, but who else?

I posted other photos of the drafting room soon after (they are toward the end of the link below), but I sat on this one, intending to one day write a “who walked here” post:

https://wrightinracine.wordpress.com/2021/09/06/wright-through-the-lens/

It is fortunate that I held off because last week I read a new post from Keiran Murphy which tells the story of the floor, a backstory I never would have guessed. The floor is like a wafer cookie, and it has a relationship to the floor at Wingspread. That’s all I will tell you. Here is a link to Keiran’s post:

https://www.keiranmurphy.com/hillside-drafting-studio-flooring/?fbclid=IwAR3SSC_CAVWs7yuVtk-ah51JlWW535FWEgOXCJAwTfLX8NOxzLri9ggJ1rk

Wright Through My Lens

All photos © Mark Hertzberg (2021)

I had not been to many Frank Lloyd Wright sites outside of Racine in more than two years until a week ago. I had a gracious lunch invitation from Minerva Montooth for Sunday, and a last-minute photo assignment in Sparta, Wisconsin (west of Spring Green) Saturday, so I overnighted in Spring Green. I have always enjoyed challenging myself to see new things at familiar Wright sites on return visits. These are some of the many fruits of last week’s visit.

I photographed at the famous cantilevered Birdwalk terrace from below:

I noticed visitors taking pictures above me while photographing the Birdwalk:

I do not plan my photo visits for a particular time of day / lighting…I shoot what is there when I am there. I explored Taliesin and the grounds of the newly-restored Wyoming Valley School Cultural Arts Center in wonderful evening light Saturday, before dinner with Keiran Murphy and “Mr. Keiran.” I visited both again in Sunday’s morning light. I saw the familiar sign for Taliesin in a different way, thanks to the sharp angle of the morning light:

The first thing I saw at Taliesin Saturday as I drove onto the grounds was the corn crib, dramatically lit by evening light:

Sunday morning I saw something different with a long lens as I drove up:

I used a powerful zoom lens to photograph Romeo and Juliet and Tan-y-deri from a distance both days:

I continued to explore with the long lens:

I sat on the floor to photograph through one of the fireplaces inside Taliesin:

I explored Wright’s office – with its own cantilevered balcony – and the original drafting room:

I photographed Taliesin itself with long and short lenses:

Going to Taliesin means also exploring Hillside Theatre and the drafting room. The theatre is currently being restored.

After photographing the ghost-like seats with the sheets covering them I looked for photos under the seats:

I also looked up:

Outside is a view of the theatre and nearby farm:

Then I went to explore the silent drafting room, first reflected in the theatre’s windows:

And, Hillside itself:

I photographed Midway Barn from the road, on my trips between Taliesin and Wyoming Valley School and once from Hillside:

The last set of photos is of the Wyoming Valley School, now known as the Wyoming Valley School Cultural Arts Center. One of the only upsides of the pandemic is that the restoration of the school was able to proceed without having to work around visitors. Many of the changes are structural and not visible. Perhaps the most visible change is that the bricks inside now approximate their original natural color…the yellow of recent years was painted over with a grayish tone.

The desks in the classroom today are not original, but I enjoyed photographing them through the mitered glass in the evening light nonetheless. This historic black and white photo shows the original desks.

Robert Hartmann’s wonderful 1960s black and white photos of Taliesin and the school still hang on the walls. His photos documenting the construction of Riverview Terrace are in the rear of the dining room at the Visitors Center.

I leave you with a photo of the Marvelous Minerva Montooth and my Taliesin selfie. Technical notes: I do no “post processing” on my photos…I do not sharpen them or increase the color saturation. What I shoot is what I get. I sometimes open the midtones a bit and do a bit of dodging and burning in…nothing that could not be done in a traditional chemical darkroom. I use two camera bodies, one has a DX or crop frame sensor, the other is FX or full frame (equivalent to what would be recorded on a 35mm piece of film). The lenses used are: 14-24mm (used on the FX body); 17-35mm (on the DX body);  a 70-200mm on the FX body, and a 200-500mm, used on both bodies. When the 200-500 is on the DX body, it is approximately the equivalent in 35mm terms of a 350-750mm lens. I thank John Clouse for selling me that lens recently…I had a wonderful time exploring Taliesin and Wyoming Valley School with it!

–30-

 

 

Hillside Drafting Room, June 2020

(c) 2020 Mark Hertzberg

A student’s bicycle outside the Hillside Drafting Room, October, 2018

Thousands of words have been written on social media and in architecture journals about the end of the relationship between the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the School of Architecture at Taliesin (SoAT), which was founded as the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. The School is moving to a new life on a new campus, and the Foundation is committed to new educational programming, bringing the historic drafting room back to life. In the meantime, it is empty, awaiting its next chapter. I photographed the drafting room June 16, 2020.

This post is visual only. I am not taking sides in the often acrimonious public debate about why the drafting room has no students this summer. I look at it, and miss the quiet intensity of the students I watched working in there. I look at it and think about the many wonderful buildings Wright and his apprentices and colleagues – and subsequent architects and students – designed here. I have photographed many of them. Now, there is silence. I invite you to study the photos, and reflect on the drafting room’s past and future.

There is one photograph I saw in the drafting room last fall, which today I regret not taking. Remember that I am a photojournalist. While I have been granted (much appreciated) special permission for photography at Taliesin, I was helping lead a Road Scholar tour and the guests were not allowed to photograph the then-busy drafting room. I saw Aaron Betsky, then Dean of SoAT in a meeting in a conference room. The door was open. I had no inkling that in six months there would a split, but it felt like an important photograph to take. Today it would be an important one for this photo essay, but the photo exists only as a memory of something I saw.