Letting walls talk

“The best buildings are always disappointing to me in photographs,” says Grant Mudford, one of the most sought-after architectural photographers working in this country. “I see buildings that are accepted as being great works of architecture, and I’ve always experienced them through photographs before I’ve actually experienced them firsthand. I’m always pleasantly surprised when I see the real thing.

“But,” he adds, “there’s a whole bunch of mediocre works of architecture that look great in photographs, a lot more interesting than they really are.” The best photographs, Mudford believes, are full of illusion and abstraction. “I don’t think photography excels at what it’s used for mostly, which is to document things.”

Despite these contrarian opinions, Mudford spends a good deal of his professional life documenting architecture, and his work has been published in nearly every major periodical and architectural journal. He has also provided the images for monographs on Rudolf Schindler and Louis Kahn and photographed the work of many of the greatest architects of our time.

“Grant is the best,” says editor Gloria Gerace, who commissioned Mudford to shoot Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall for a book being published by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in collaboration with the Getty Research Center. A number of other photographers are working on the book, but she wanted someone to create a series of classical images of the building during its construction and at completion. “The person to give you gorgeous photographs,” Gerace says, “is Grant Mudford.”

Along the way, Mudford has been doing some work of his own on Disney Hall, a series he sees purely as art and as having nothing to do with documentation. These images, now on display at the Santa Monica gallery owned by his longtime dealer and partner, Rosamund Felsen, do not explore the magnificence of Gehry’s statement. Instead, they focus on the messier side of its creation, in 5-foot-tall light-jet prints. Networks of air ducts and webs of scaffolding are central images, as are sweeping exterior planes still surrounded by bare steel armatures and the intersection of soaring cranes with Gehry’s preliminary framework. Although many of these pictures are instantly identifiable as Disney Hall, their interest lies not in the building itself so much as in the patterns that emerge from the rough-and-tumble construction site. The passage of time is irrelevant, except if you notice that an identical view of the building is depicted, six months apart, in two images.

“I am not a ‘decisive moment’ photographer,” says Mudford, referring to the art of capturing the essence of a scene in a single instant so identified with Henri Cartier-Bresson. “My work takes quite a while to compose.”

When Mudford is shooting, he makes every effort to respect the architecture. “I feel honored that I’ve been given the responsibility, and I do what I can to make it look good. That’s my job.” The challenge, he says, is not in depicting the forms but in recognizing the totality of a building. “It’s not about pizazz and what you see from the street,” he says. “It’s all about light and space. Those are the two essential qualities of architecture. As Louis Kahn said, ‘Light, the giver of all presences.’ ”

At 58, Mudford still speaks with the soft, lilting accent of his native Australia, which he left behind nearly three decades ago. In an interview at the Felsen gallery, he says that although he was always interested in photography and it came naturally to him even as a young boy, he studied architecture in college, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He was looking for a profession, in part to reassure his family, but he found he wasn’t very good at drawing. As a result, his avocation became his career, and after graduation he began doing commercial photography to make a living and art to satisfy his desires.

In 1974, Mudford came to the United States on a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. The money gave him the means to travel extensively, living out of a van and shooting black-and-white images of innocuous buildings. The large-scale prints focus on details of contrasting flat surfaces, resulting in quasi-abstract compositions reminiscent of the grid paintings of Mondrian or Ad Reinhardt. Mudford says these early works were influenced by Walker Evans, who magically infused power into small incidents. “One of the beautiful things about photography is that it can turn really dumb stuff that nobody takes notice of into icons,” he says.

Mudford continued on this path until the early ‘80s and in the process caught the eye not only of the art world but also of the architecture world. Architects began to invite Mudford to document their work, and his reputation grew. After dividing his time between New York and Los Angeles for years, he settled here and for the past 20 years has shared his life with Felsen. Throughout, he has continued to make art, including some portraiture and his more idiosyncratic images of light, space and buildings. His work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and Australia, as well as in Japan.

Mudford’s series on Disney Hall shows him moving away from the flat, planar qualities of the early work. The new pictures are still very geometric but with much greater depth and complexity in the subjects. Using the same Swiss Sinar camera that he uses for his commissioned photos and printing the images with Chip Leavitt at A&I; in Hollywood (the first time he hasn’t done his own darkroom work), he has achieved a clarity and three-dimensionality reminiscent of the landscapes of Ansel Adams -- but on a much larger scale.

Mudford says he greatly admires Gehry’s work, and he would seem to have no reason to doubt his own ability to capture it. Nevertheless, he speaks with some trepidation of the competitive challenge he will face when the concert hall is finished.

“There’s going to be a million photographers photographing that place inside and out, and I’ll be doing the same angle as everybody else.”

Looking at the images on the gallery walls, he muses, “This may be the best work I’ll do about this building.”