Presence and Flow in the Photographs of Philip Trager

by Reed Haslach Humphery

December 2009 National Building Museum Online

Canal Plus, 1995, Gelatin silver print, 22 7/8 x 18 7/8 inches, © Philip Trager.

A building, like a person, has a certain “presence.” When referring to a person, the term implies a range of characteristics including posture, facial expressions, and demeanor. In the case of a building, “presence” suggests the sometimes ineffable qualities that influence one’s perceptions of the structure. A building’s presence may be warm and inviting, off-putting and distant, or even spiritual. Such qualities contribute to our feelings of comfort (or discomfort) in the world we build for ourselves.

One’s perception of a building’s presence is based on a variety of elements, some of them accidental, many of them deliberate. It is informed by factors intentional by design, circumstances unforeseen, and the personal experiences of the viewer. Architects and designers make choices of scale, symmetry (or lack thereof), materials, and response to context—though the context is likely to change over time. Other factors such as weather, quality of light at various times of year and day, and where the viewer happens to stand also affect readings of a building’s presence. Viewers’ varied cultural and educational backgrounds bias the ways in which they see and sense the built environment. And, finally, whether we see a building in person or via a photograph greatly affects our understanding of its presence.

Following the success of the first permanent photograph in 1826—Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras (La cour du domaine du Gras), which is a view from a window at the artist’s house in the French countryside—photography and, more specifically, the mass publication of photographic images, have expanded our understanding of the world and connected us with places that most people would never be able to see in person. But the necessary corollary to a world seen through photographs is the important role of an invisible third entity—the photographer—who mediates our perceptions of presence and place. The character of a building as seen in a photograph is shaped by the eye behind the lens and the hand on the shutter button. What we perceive is not our own direct sense of the building, but that of the photographer.

Philip Trager: A Portrait of the Photographer

Bristol, 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, 14 7/8 x 18 7/8 inches, © Philip Trager.

The early work of photographer Philip Trager was characterized as belonging to the tradition of “straight” photography because of the detail, sharp focus, and range of high and low contrasts in his images. “Straight” photographs are often interpreted as a depiction of the world as it would appear in reality. Over the years, however, as Trager continued to photograph architecture and landscapes in New England, New York City, Italy, and Paris (among other locations), a desire to convey his personal sense of a building or city’s presence—to emphasize the emotive aspects of an image rather than to act as documentarian—became increasingly evident in his work. He achieved this by carefully composing views of architecture on his ground glass (mainly using a view camera), employing a nimble sense of perspective and balance, taking full advantage of the myriad properties of natural light, and refining his images in the darkroom during the printing process.

Trager has come to believe strongly in the centrality of intuition and emotional response—which lead to a feeling he refers to as “flow”—in his artistic process. He has discussed flow as “that feeling where time just flies past because you’re doing something that you really want to do, it’s challenging but not so difficult that it becomes stressful, and you’re completely absorbed.” Trager feels intuition and flow have been a central element in his photography and may be at the heart of conveying his personal response to his subjects. He purposefully does not research or create studies of his subject matter in advance in order to allow himself to have an instinctual response. And so, despite primarily working with a view camera for his photographs of architecture—ironically, a slow photographic process that requires much deliberate effort—Trager has an ability to lose himself in the moment, enabling him to effectively capture and convey his sense of a building’s presence to the viewer.

Photographs of Architecture

Trager in New York

Metropolitan Life and Flatiron Buildings, 1979, Gelatin silver print, 18 7/8 x 14 7/8. © Philip Trager.

Trager’s next major project, following the publication of Photographs of Architecture in 1977, was a series of photographs he took in Manhattan. Though the collection now serves as a visual document of New York in the late 1970s, Trager’s explicit intent was to capture the city’s essence. Trager met this challenge in large part through his use of dramatic perspective, photographing the city from the street level looking up, from above looking downward, and through turns, cracks, and crevices between buildings. The resulting photographs convey a sense of the way we might experience—and certainly how Trager himself experienced—New York’s constant activity, grand scale, and density. A shadowy 1979 image of the Metropolitan Life building shows a glimpse of the Flatiron building through its archway, highlighted against a backdrop of brilliant white light, as if the viewer happened to glance sideways while walking past. In another captivating view, Trager turns his eye and lens upward to capture an office building rocketing towards a sky spotted with clouds. Native Manhattan novelist Louis Auchincloss commented of Trager’s photographs in the introduction to Philip Trager: New York (1980), “Perhaps one has to have lived in Manhattan to know how remarkably Trager has caught the effect of huge objects on our daily lives. . . Trager confronts us with the strange spirituality of even the grossly material, with the unearthliness of things most earthy.”

Further, the absence of people in Trager’s photographs underscores that these are mediated views. Our perception of a building’s presence in Trager’s photographs, such as a view of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street (1977), would surely be different were we standing at that corner on a busy weekday afternoon, with traffic and pedestrians interrupting our attention and focus on the building. In Trager’s silent images, we are able to concentrate fully and focus on the structure itself. And, in the absence of people in the camera’s view, Trager’s eye as photographer and our vantage point as viewers are amplified. The inclusion of people in Trager’s images—third parties—might, in fact, interrupt the line of visual conversation between photographer, viewer, and that which is viewed.

The Villas of Palladio

Villa Emo, 1984, Gelatin silver print, 24 7/8 x 28 7/8 inches, © Philip Trager.

In a shift of geography and architectural style, Trager looked to the natural landscape and site context in his next project to inform a series of photographs of Andrea Palladio’s 15th-century Italian villas. He was purposeful in his desire to photograph the villas in such a way that rendered them devoid of any signs of their contemporary contexts, such as modern roads and signage, cables, and other accoutrements of 21st-century connectivity, and thus to reconnect them with the Veneto landscape, making clear their relationship to their sites just as Palladio himself originally intended. These photographs resonate with contrasting senses of timeless classical beauty and decay. A sense of tranquility comes through these images in part due to Trager’s emphasis on symmetry and balance and in part because he was able to channel his own sense of the villas’ presence in evocative photographs. Taking a cue from Palladio’s neo-Classical architectural style, Trager composed a view of Villa Emo (1984) that is perfectly balanced, the right and left sides of the image practically mirroring each other. It conveys a sense of grounded stability via a horizon line that Trager has maintained across the image. The shadowy gray clouds in the sky emphasize the strong geometric lines and angles of the building.

Trager has spoken of the sense of peace he experienced while photographing the villas, and has commented that it was much easier to find his “flow” during this project than it was in New York, where he was often distracted by oncoming traffic and activity around him. Taking advantage of these conditions, this is the only project in which he generally photographed single buildings as a practice from varying distances and points of view. Three images of Villa Almerico Capra, also known as La Rotonda (all 1984), show the building and its site from different perspectives and each image exudes a different sense of the villa’s presence. A view from afar, across a field of dandelions gone to seed, shows a structure heavy at rest, while an image taken directly in front of the villa standing down a walkway—its entrance at the center of what would be a vanishing point in the perspective of the image—is again an example of a centered, nearly symmetrical view interrupted only by a tall pine. A haunting image taken by Trager from underneath the villa’s portico, looking out into the landscape, glows with late afternoon light that casts long heavy shadows from the immense columns and picks up the stone’s texture.

Changing Paris

Villa Pojana, 1984, Gelatin silver print, 22 7/8 x 17 7/8 inches, © Philip Trager.

Nearly ten years after his work in Italy, Trager traveled to Paris four times between 1993 and 1995 to create a portrait of the city. He had in the meantime undertaken his first project to photograph dance and movement, which greatly inform these subsequent images. Though Trager ultimately organized his task of photographing Paris as a tour along the river Seine, his objective was to capture a particular sense of the city. In part, he did so through his devoted attention to the light of Paris, which he has described as a soft, developing, luminous light, impacted by the river. While many iconic and recognizable buildings are pictured, they are themselves secondary to the subject, which is light. Trager photographed the city during all four seasons, in varying weather conditions, during the day and at night, resulting in an array of expressive images that convey a personal impression of the city.

Philip Trager’s images of buildings and places—regardless of whether they are widely known or largely unfamiliar—are unmistakably reflective of his personal response to their presence. He recently said of his work, “When someone looks at [a photograph] they say, ‘Well, I have been to that Palladian villa. . .  It doesn't look like that.’ And that's the greatest compliment to me, because I have made it my own. . . I think driving throughout all this is my personal response.” Though few would argue against the centrality of Trager’s technical mastery of the camera and his fluency in the tools of artistic formalism, it is his openness to an intuitive response to his subject that ultimately conveys so effectively his sense of a building’s presence in his photographs.

Reed Haslach Humphery is an independent curator based in Durham, North Carolina. Recent projects include Form and Movement: Photographs by Philip Trager at the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., on view through January 3, 2010. Humphery earned a Master of Arts degree in Museum Studies, with an academic focus on visual culture, from The George Washington University.

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