INTERIOR Photography

I am an award-winning international interior Photographer offering services across different sectors around the world. I work for commercial ownership groups, private owners, interior designers and international magazines.

My work covers a wide range of photographic activities. They can all be described as Interior Photography but they involve working in very varied markets and industries.

‘Commercial Interior Photography’ covers the commercial photoshoots I undertake for marketing and advertising agencies, or working directly for commercial clients. All are location photography within commercial premises. Some shoots are of workplace interiors like offices and studios, others are of retail outlets like shops and boutiques.

‘Luxury Residential Photography’ covers work I have undertaken as an interior photographer in the world of international luxury real estate. London features regularly but I also work across international markets in the MENA region, the Americas and Europe.

‘Contemporary Interior Photography’ covers the many contemporary houses I have photographed worldwide often for Private Clients or international editorials such as Wallpaper* and Dwell.

‘Museums, Art Galleries, Stately Homes’ describes the photography I have undertaken in these heritage and cultural sectors.

‘Historic Interior Photography’ by contrast covers smaller private houses often shot for editorials such as Country Life or House & Garden or for private clients but outside the world of high end real estate.

The same skills as an interior architecture photographer are utilized but the buildings and interiors are primarily photographed for cultural significance rather than their financial value.

‘Set-Built Interior Photography’ requires a category all of it’s own as it involves a method and a market that is specific. This method is used when I photograph advertising campaigns and marketing collateral such as catalogues that benefit from constructing sets to shoot into.

This often involves advertising product photography of household goods, white goods, furniture and homewares.

But what is interiors photography and where did it come from?

Interiors photography (or Interior Photography as it is often called) is the photography of interior spaces often designed by interior designers or decorators rather than by architects. These are the spaces and surfaces immediately occupied and touched by the user. 

However the history of the photographic genre of ‘Interior Photography’ long predates the distinct profession of ‘Interior Designer ‘and it’s origins lie at the end of the 19th century in a photographic movement called ‘Pictorialism’.

Pictorialism was a reaction to the standardisation and mass-marketing of photography that came with the introduction of roll-film and simple-to-use Kodak push-button cameras that made photography a hobby for the masses. Its proponents employed complex printing techniques such as carbon, bromoil and platinum that allowed greater scope for manipulation in production to make prints that felt more like unique artworks than an off-shoot of mass production. (The original results, were often deliberately hazy images which George Bernard Shaw facetiously termed: “Fuzzygraphs.”)

But the search for the powerful interior image is more than simply a search for a handcrafted product. It was more a search for what might crudely be called a photograph with soul. In 1893 the editor of American Amateur Photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was one of Pictorialism’s most eminent proponents, used the publication to launch an attack on the formal and precise style of architectural imagery produced at the ‘World’s Columbian Exposition’ in Chicago. His complaint was with the quasi-scientific approach he felt architectural photographers were taking.

Stieglitz’s alternative can be seen in his photograph of ‘The Flatiron Building, New York’ (1903) then one the most famous new buildings in the US. This photograph was shot not as his architectural peers would have done with a tripod in sunlight but handheld and in the snow. Much of the detail of the building’s complex decoration cannot be made out but Stieglitz was more interested in how the ghost-like shape served as a metaphor, writing that:

“It appeared to be moving toward one like the bow of a monster ocean steamer - a picture of a new America still in the making.”

This new interiors aesthetic therefore prioritised the feel of something over its precise delineation. Stieglitz was prepared to sacrifice information from the building to better illuminate an idea about the building.

The professional interior photographers who developed this Pictoralist approach were fortunate to coincide with a technological development in printing - the invention of the 'half-tone block’ in the 1880s - that made it possible to print both type and photography on the same page. This suddenly allowed books and magazines to reproduce photography economically and in unlimited numbers.

Three influential magazines founded at the end of the 19th century reproduced in great detail the interior spaces of residential buildings using this revolutionary technology: ‘Architectural Record’ (1891) founded in Boston, and the ‘Architectural Review’ (1896) and ‘Country Life’ (1897) in London.

These magazines required professional photographers capable of reproducing accurate photographs of both interiors and exteriors. Exteriors bathed in an abundance of natural light were a comparatively easy technical photographic challenge yet the dark interiors of the Arts and Crafts houses, then in vogue, were a much harder ask. The photographers who could manage the contrast between dark rooms and bright windows, while at the same time giving a sense of the feel of the interior space become the first generation of true interiors photographers. 

Frederick Evans was hailed by many, including Stieglitz, as the finest of this generation of photographers and his most famous work: ‘A Sea of Steps, Wells Cathedral’ (1903), helped establish interiors photography as an independent art form. 

This photograph depicting the steps up to Wells Cathedral’s Chapter House focused on the natural indentations in the steps caused by generations of clerical feet, made a striking composition into a meditation on the passage of time. This image, which was immediately recognised as a masterpiece, elevated the genre of Interiors Photography and established Evans as the first famous interior photographer. Evans revealed his philosophy of photography in a piece of advice for other professionals:

“Try for a record of an emotion rather than a piece of topography”  

Obviously since the subject was non-sentient he clearly meant that the interior should be photographed in such a way that it revealed the emotional response of the photographer to the interior rather than just a record of the appearance of the space. And this approach to interiors photography, one that sought to evoke a personal response, always distinguished the best interiors photographers from those architectural photographers who prioritised the documentary function of their craft.

The advent of the Modern Movement in the early twentieth century further exacerbated the split between the photographic genres with the iconic period of modernism nearly entirely defined by very dramatic exteriors photographs shot in sunny and hence contrasty conditions (often augmented by polarising filters that darkened blue skies and lightened cloud). 

Photographers like Ezra Stoller in the US and Dell & Wainwright in the UK shot powerful punchy dramatic images of architectural forms of pure white, concrete and glass. By contrast the finest interiors photographers like Edwin Smith photographed with subtlety and printed their black-and-white photos in softer graduated tones of grey. In the case of works like ‘Parish Church, Westhall, Suffolk 1959’ Smith could depict both the glazing bars in a bright window and also the dark pews beneath them. Smith, arguably the greatest practitioner of interiors photography since Evans described his style as “co-operating with the inevitable” and his elegiac photographs always reveal the sensitive emotional response of the photographer to the atmosphere of the interior. 

Interestingly Edwin Smith shares with me an influential client as both of us, ‘though in very different periods, have photographed extensively for publishers Thames & Hudson. Like him I have also grappled with the technical challenges afforded by dark historic interiors so I can appreciate the expertise he displayed.