Richard Bryant is one of the world’s leading architectural photographers. Now, a new book celebrates the Kingston master’s finest work. Bruce Millar lines up his lens...
Richard Bryant has been “very lucky”, he insists: lucky to have been able to combine his two passions of photography and architecture into a 50-year career as one of the world’s leading architectural photographers.
“A lot of photography is just having fun,” he says with characteristic modesty. “I’m just lucky to do something I enjoy so much for a living.”
He has been lucky, too, in the very timing of his career, which coincided with what he describes as “the most extraordinary period” in both professions. The 1970s, when he began his working life, heralded the emergence of a whole generation of ‘starchitects’ – Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers – who became sought after on a global scale, as increasingly lavish office blocks, museums and concert halls sprang up around the world.
Photography also reached new heights aesthetically, as the colour film transparency was perfected, and a boom in high-quality, visually based magazines created a ready market.
“Everything exploded in the 80s,” says Bryant, “I was fortunate enough to work with all the best architects of the era.”
Now his work is to be celebrated in a large-format book: a retrospective survey with commentary by eminent photography curators Martin Caiger-Smith and Valeria Carullo. He is “incredibly flattered”, he says, as we leaf through its beautiful images at his Kingston home.
Richard Bryant
Some of the photos are almost purely abstract.
You might not guess that images shot at the old Bow Street Magistrates Court in Covent Garden – before it was converted into a boutique hotel – or at James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart revealed the interiors of buildings.
Others teem with human life, as in a tremendous image that captures the cathedral-like Madrid airport baggage hall by Richard Rogers.
Richard Bryant
Bryant loves clashes of traditional and contemporary architecture, as in his images of Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI museum in Rome, where futuristic forms are hemmed tightly in by old city streetscapes. He is fascinated by staircases, both old and new, the visual patterns of which can echo the repetitive rhythms of Modernist art.
Richard Bryant
Caption; Museum Gipsoteca Antonio CanovaCanova,Possagno, Italy
He also relishes the play of natural light on buildings. Indeed, one section of the book is titled ‘Chasing the Light’, a phrase used by his assistant when they had to wait 24 hours for the sun to strike a window at the perfect angle for a photo of the Museo Canova in Possagno, northern Italy.
“We had a 30-minute window to capture the atmosphere, the form and space and shadows,” he remembers.
These are composed photographs – images in which the various elements are carefully arranged – and thus reward long and repeated viewing. Bryant’s working methods, involving long preparation that includes black-and-white Polaroid studies, may produce only one or two photos a day. Artistically, it is Dutch 17th-century painters, rather than his fellow photographers, who have most inspired him for their rich compositional skills.
Big-name architects are not always the easiest clients to handle, but Bryant has never had any problems, his self-effacing charm clearly masking a steely self-confidence. When he first worked with Sir James Stirling, photographing the art gallery in Stuttgart, the architect presented him with a list of suggested shots. But when Bryant made it clear he had his own ideas, Stirling deferred to his superior judgment.
“I don’t think any architect expects me to interpret their work through their eyes,” says Bryant – and no wonder, when he makes their buildings look so ravishing.
Part of his skill lies in his own early training as an architect: he sees things with an architect’s eye and speaks the architect’s language.
“I had no photographic education at all,” he says. “It just came naturally. I observed what other people were doing and adapted it to my own purposes.”
Richard Bryant
He loved taking photos as a schoolboy, but never considered it as a career; instead studying architecture at Kingston Polytechnic (now Kingston University) before starting work in an architectural practice. Here, he threw himself into taking construction site photos – at the expense of time spent at his desk.
“I was criticised for taking too many photographs and not doing enough design work,” he says, laughing at the memory. “To tell the truth, I would never have made a good architect – my attention span is too short.”
Once Bryant had a photographic foothold, however, the commissions blossomed, and he was able to leave architectural practice behind. His camera took him around the world, to North America, Australia, Japan, Dubai and Israel on commissions for such clients as magazine publisher Condé Nast, Pentagram design studio and arts philanthropist Lord Rothschild.
In that analogue era, he would travel with multiple cases of equipment, keeping a separate set of lighting in New York – identical but working on a different voltage – to pick up for North American assignments. And hauling all this cumbersome luggage was no easy matter: Bryant’s wife, Lynne – the original assistant, agent and archivist – injured her back during a shoot at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia home.
A golden age for photography. Yet it ended almost as quickly as it began, with the arrival of digital cameras in the 1990s. Sports photographers led the charge into the digital realm, enabling faster delivery of pictures to newspapers, and by the mid-2000s, most editors would not accept colour transparencies for publication.
Bryant, however, is by no means a Luddite.
“It’s just another way of capturing an image,” he says. “I still get under a black cloth set-up in the same way, I still only take one shot in hours – and it’s certainly liberating to have ditched all those heavy cases.”
Even so, there has been a real loss. Modern viewers are sated by the dozens of images they take and exchange on their smartphones, scrolling over them as if watching a video.
Richard Bryant
“Photography is a devalued aesthetic now,” complains Bryant. “Nobody is really looking at pictures anymore.”
There is poignancy, too, in the transitory nature of the art form he mastered. Colour slides deteriorate with age and require refrigerated storage, which can be prohibitively expensive. Digitising is hardly any cheaper.
“Photographers are throwing their work away,” laments Bryant – a true irony for a form that promised to capture images forever.
Now in his 70s, Bryant is still working – if no longer chasing commissions. His current main project focuses on the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, who designed an extension for the Museo Canova and also transformed the austere Castelvecchio fortress in Verona into a modern museum over eight years up to 1964 – a perfect example of old and new architectural styles working together.
“Scarpa introduced beautifully detailed Modernist elements into this simple 14th-century Gothic building, so it’s both modern and medieval – architectural heaven,” says Bryant.
Now he has been commissioned to shoot the interior of a rare, privately owned Scarpa apartment in Venice.
“My favourite architect in the world – and in Venice too,” he enthuses. “Double heaven!”
Richard Bryant, a retrospective survey, is published by Lund Humphries (£49.99)
