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>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
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>> Ford Peatross: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. On behalf of the Princeton Photographs Division of the Library of Congress and its Center for Architecture, Design, and Engineering, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to today's program, an illustrated presentation by the distinguished American architect and photographer, Norman McGrath. I would like to remind you that this event is being videotaped for broadcast on the library's website and other media. We encourage you and the audience to ask questions and offer comments during the question-and-answer period, but please realize that in participating in the Q&A period, you will be consenting to the library possibly reproducing and transmitting your remarks. Perhaps we also should take a moment to thank the Roman goddess Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and learning, who presides over this place, who apparently has worked out an accommodation with her sometimes feckless brother Mercury, the god of travel and transportation, so that you all could be here today. My name is Ford Peatross, and I direct the Center for Architecture, Design, and Engineering, whose goal is to further our understanding and appreciation of its subjects. Certainly, this is what Norman McGrath has done during over five decades as an architectural photographer. I am here today with my colleague, Mari Nakahara --
>> Mari Nakahara: Hello.
>> Ford Peatross: Our new Curator of Architecture, Design, and Engineering, to introduce Norman, in possibly my last official program introduction before I retire at the end of April after over 40 years at the library, happily handing over the reins to Mari and doing so with total confidence in her abilities to carry on this work. But back to the subject at hand, born in London, Norman's father was the Australian born architect and author Raymond McGrath. Norman was educated in Ireland, where he earned an engineering degree at Trinity College Dublin. Thus, how appropriate it is that he is here with us on St. Patrick's Day. And I see he's wearing a bit o' the green, as are a number of people in the audience, and I failed, and I'm part Irish. I don't know how that happened. After working in Dublin for a year or so as a structural engineer, he moved to New York in 1956. Over the next five years, he gradually made the transition into the field of professional photography, specializing in architecture and interiors. Norman has become one of the best known and respected photographers of the world's great buildings and architecture. Every major architectural publication has featured his images. His long career includes a wide variety of work for many well-known architects and designers. Norman is the only architectural photographer invited to join Canon's Explorers of Light program, which includes many of the top professionals in a wide variety of photographic specialties. His most popular book, "Photographing Buildings Inside and Out", has sold more than 47,000 copies. For Princeton Architectural Press, he co-authored two books, "Manhattan Skyscrapers" with text by Eric Nash, published in 1999 with revised editions in 2005 and 2010, and "Skyscraper Rivals", a book featuring four early New York buildings, with text by Daniel Abramson, published in 2000. In 1985, the AIA selected Norman for its Institute Honor, and the New York chapter of the AIA awarded him a special citation for photography in 1999. In addition to his assignment work, Norman gives seminars and teaches with the Maine Photographic Workshops and the Palm Beach Photo Workshops and the Calumet Institute in conjunction with the University of Maryland. In 1995, the AIA selected him for its Institute Honor. And I've already talked about the special citation.
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[ Laughter ]
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Exhibits of his work include a solo exhibition of his black and white photographs at the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland in 2001. Norman contributed a photo essay to the book "New York's Pennsylvania Station". It's written by my esteemed colleague, Hillary Ballon, and published in 2002. This was especially meaningful because Norman's first job in architectural photography was documenting the 1963 demolition of McKim, Mead, and White's great lost structure, whose fate is still very much in the news today. The significance of the station's destruction further was made tangible by architectural historian Vincent Scully's memorable words, quote, "One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat," unquote. Both McGrath and Scully have shown us that architecture does matter. In 2011, Norman began to donate the archive of his professional photography to the Library of Congress, rights free, that now includes well over 100,000 large format film and high resolution digital images. We are fortunate that Norman will now share a part of his considerable talent, experience, and wisdom in helping us to understand what makes architectural photography different. I can think of no one better qualified for the task.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Well, thank you very much for those glowing words, and thank you all. It's great to see such a lively and full audience here. I'm really honored, in particular, of course, and I have to wish you all a happy St. Patrick's Day. When Ford gave me the opportunity of selecting a day in April, of course, he sooner came to today's date, the 17th of March. I knew that that's the date it had to be. In any event, so here I am. And thank you, Ford, for all those interesting details about my early life because that now means that I don't have to go into too much detail about that. But let me say, of course, that my father was enormously influential and without fostering the interest in architecture that I gained through him, I would not be where I am today. And you might wonder why it is that, for example, I did not study architecture in the first place. And it so happens that Trinity College Dublin, where most of my education was funneled in the early '50s, has no school of -- it has all the major schools, but no school of architecture. So you cannot study -- in other words, if you go -- if you interview an Irish architect and asked him where he studied, he's certainly not going to say Trinity College, Dublin, because it has no school. So I did what I thought was the next best thing, and as a structural engineer, of course, structural engineers work with architects closely. And they are the ones that make the buildings stand up, make the dreams come true. And so, they play an important role. One of the things, however, that engineering training normally lacks is any emphasis on the aesthetics of things. And so, it's -- that is usually -- when you get really elaborate structures, that's left to those few engineers who really have the imagination to see how marvelous these structures can be, people like Calatrava, for example, and Luigi Nervi before him, and so on. And -- but they are unusual, and they are standouts. And -- but I wanted to dwell on the fact that architectural photography as a field of endeavor is different than other fields of photography. Why is that? Part of the reason is that we are all very familiar with the subject, what it looks like, and if the photograph doesn't look the same way the structure does, we feel uncomfortable. I am -- I used to constantly gripe about the fact that, for example, when I picked up the real estate section of the New York Times that very frequently the buildings that I saw depicted there were very, very distorted. They were taken with wide-angle lenses, and clearly the photographers had tilted their cameras back. And these buildings looked like pyramids more than the rectangular subjects that they in fact were. And I often wondered why they accepted that, because I knew that they -- it didn't have to be that way. The New York Times didn't have and still doesn't have many photographers who are really gifted in the documentation of architecture. They have a couple, but that's not their -- normally their main thrust. So one of the aspects then is to somehow or other determine what it is that making the documentation of architecture such a challenge. And in the early days of architectural photography, most of it was exterior initially. The lenses that most photographers used were fairly long focal lengths lenses. In other words, you stood back from your subject. And because these were longer focal length lenses, the -- you did not get the same depth that is possible when you approach your subject more closely and photograph it with a wider angle lens. This is true of both interiors and exteriors. And this is a factor which really comes into play because today -- well, let me go back a bit. When I got into photography first, I was a -- really a late bloomer, really, you might say, because I didn't take any photographs until after I graduated from college. And at that point, I decided I was -- I knew that I wanted to come to America. And I thought, well, you know, I'm going to document a little bit of what Dublin is all about so that when I come to America, I can show my American relatives what Ireland is all about. And indeed, I am -- even before I came here, I was half-American, because my mother was from Dallas, Texas. So it was really because of my American grandfather, whom I met as a child, that I had decided a long, long time ago that I wanted to come and live in America. I mean I really literally made that when I was still a very young person. And so, the sort of die was cast. In any event, when I got into the field of photography first, on graduation, my best friend was given a graduation present of a brand-new camera, and I bought his old camera. And that was the camera that I started out with, which was a 35-millimeter range finder camera, very straightforward, rather awkward to use. Every time you changed -- it had interchangeable lenses, but every time you changed the lens, you had to put on a separate viewfinder because it wasn't a reflex camera. So it was very, very tedious, completely unlike today's cameras, which make life so easy that you not only don't have to know what the settings mean or say, you know, it does it all. Now, not all cameras, but many of them do. So in the -- one had to learn the hard way by trial and error. And because of my interest in architecture, a lot of the photographs that I initially took were architectural in nature. And I quickly found what a challenge it was. And I came to America. I worked as -- for four or five years as a structural engineer, as Ford has mentioned. And at the end of that period, the firm that I had been with went into a rather long, slow decline due the death of principle partners in the firm. And at that point, they -- you know, they had been one of the top ten consulting firms in the country with over 100 structural engineers. They gradually wrapped -- that got reduced. I was number 25. They went down to about 20. But at that point, I said, "Do I really want to be a structural engineer for the rest of my life?", because I had been finding that, although engineering was interesting, it wasn't as creative as architecture was. It just lacked that extra thing for me at that point. So I decided, okay, I'm going to have a fling at photography. I'd been becoming an increasingly involved amateur at that point. I'm talking now about the late '50s, early '60s. And so, I went out, bought myself a four by five view camera. I already had determined that the tool of choice in that era was a four by five view camera, and if I was going to be serious about the subject, I had to have one of those cameras. Well, there weren't very many places to learn how to do that. So it was a lot of question of trial and error. And in those early days, I actually spent quite a bit of time here in Washington, DC, as what can be described by my old friends here, the Luces [assumed spelling], whom I meet today for the first time in 53 years.
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And that's saying something. So I would come down to Washington, and I would stay with my aunt and uncle, who lived in Chevy Chase. And I got -- I became very friendly with a couple of Washington architects, one of whom, a man named Tad Dynelle [assumed spelling], was very interested in a book on Georgetown architecture. So I would come down, and I would go out with Tad with my by four by five view camera and document all of -- all the famous houses in Georgetown from that era. And we -- I even had I think probably the first exhibition of photography was something that Tad had organized in promotion of that idea. Sadly, the book never came to fruition. But it was a very good way of cutting my teeth. In any event, not long after I had made this decision to get into the field, I got a call from one of the engineers who had been in the firm that I had also been in, and he said he had left the firm too. And he was one of the associates and had founded his own firm. And on the strength of his major client, which was the Intercontinental Hotels, he was looking for employees. And he said, "Norman, I hear you're interested in getting into the field of architectural photography. Are you also interested in eating?"
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And that was becoming rather pertinent. So I decided, yes, that that was something that I was interested in doing. And I managed to make a -- an arrangement with him where I worked part time. Now that meant that I no longer had to rely on any income, which was pretty minimum in the initial stages. I had also decided that the way to get a foothold in the field of architectural photography was to try and get publication as much as possible. And in those -- in those days, there were four major architectural magazines. It's amazing to think that of those four, only one still exists, Architectural Record. None of the others, Architectural Plus, Progressive Architecture, they're all gone by the [inaudible]. Now these were magazines that I worked for on a regular basis. I knew the people there. I would photograph a lot of things on speculation, bring them to their attention. Sometimes I would get assignments then to go back and do them again. One such assignment I did was on the way back from Washington, DC, to New York. I stopped in Baltimore, and it was just after the completion of the One Charles Center by Mies van der Rohe, beautiful afternoon. I took out my four by five camera, and I shot the hell out of it. And I got back to New York, and I called up Architecture Forum, and I said, "By any chance, would you be interested in photographs of the new Charles Center?" And they looked at me, and they said, "We just sent back a photographer for the second time and has produced absolutely unusable material. Are we interested?" Well, not only did they get featured. They got on the cover of the magazine, and I got assignments from Mies's office. I never met -- got to meet Mies, but I got assignments from his office. And I met associates from his office. And that was -- you know, that was a tremendous piece of luck. Another thing that happened here in Washington, DC, was that back in the early '60s, Interiors Magazine decided to do a feature on Washington architects and interiors for the national convention of the NSID. And that was edited by a lady named Olga Geft [assumed spelling]. This magazine had absolutely no money. I don't know how they ever put that magazine out. And so, most of the time, Olga would take the pictures. And she was a pretty good photographer, but she really didn't have the time because she was running the magazine as well. So what she would do is she would say, "Look, I want to go feature this building." And so, she would twist the arms of the architects of the buildings to employ me to take the pictures, and I would do that. And that's how I met many of my early contacts in the Washington, DC, area. And then I -- a lot of the -- of that -- I think it was 1963 vintage edition featured my work and -- in Washington, DC. And it was, you know, another way of -- that luck played a part. But I interrupted myself a little bit. One of the things that I -- when I got into the field early on, wide-angle lens photography was in its -- I mean it was still a very developing field. I felt, especially with interiors, that when you got into an interior that you -- that you needed to do that. And in order to do that, you needed to have a fairly wide field to capture the interior. But you had to do that very carefully because if you don't the picture gets very distorted and uncomfortable. So you -- it's always a compromise. The job of -- or what it boils down to in many cases is that you are trying to disguise the fact that you've used as wide a focus length lens or as short a focal length that you have to give you the coverage that you want without making it look distorted. You want to get -- you want to sort of capture what it's like to be in the space. And also, you want to -- if you have to introduce lighting into that space, do so very carefully, because if it's obvious, I think it detracts. I -- and this is particularly true in today's -- in a more sophisticated era when most interiors, be they domestic or otherwise, involve lighting consultants and so on so that most of them are well lit and they don't need a lot of supplemental lighting. So if somebody looks at a photograph of mine and says did I light it or not, then I feel I've succeeded because they don't know. I've only introduced as much light as necessary. And in today's world, in the digital world, most of my photography is done without the aid of additional lighting because of the techniques that have now come to pass in digital which enable you to take maybe two or three images from the same spot, use them -- a technique which is known in some circles as high dynamic range, HDR. And some cameras have this ability so that when you click the shutter, instead of getting one image, you get three, a normal exposure, an underexposure, and an overexposure, under, normal, over. You combine that range, and if it's done properly and well and the program is good, you can in fact get a -- an end result which is much the same if -- as though you had introduced light. And if it's done badly, it looks awful. But if it's done properly, it can be terrific. And that's one of the great advantages of the jump to digital. Now as I say, in the early days when -- as -- not -- when I first got involved in photography, most of it was in black and white. But that was in the era when in fact it became a lot less expensive to reproduce in color. So as that happened, obviously I start -- I -- the demand for color photographs evolved as it did so that now, of course, it's -- nobody dreams of photographing in black and white, which is sad because I think still it's a very beautiful medium for the depiction of architecture. And I think that some of the old classic black and white photographs you have to look at them clearly. And I still have in my files photographs of the same subject in color and black and white. And I prefer the black and whites to the color. And I don't want to -- I am going to show 50 slides, which I will talk about. I didn't want to start doing that because I get carried away once we're at the images. And I digress too frequently. But let me say as the color evolved, I also evolved. In -- when I started out in photography, many of the architectural clients that I have -- and my -- most of my clients were either editorial magazines and that or they were architects. Not many others, I mean, but that's simply the way it worked out. The particular point, though, that I wanted to make was that in those early those the -- in the practice of architecture it was different. There were major architectural firms that regards interiors as something that they didn't want to get involved in. Now today's world, I mean it's very different. It's amazing to compare now how much that has changed because once architects realized that they were cutting off a major component or a major potential by excluding themselves from the interiors, you know, that really didn't make sense. So nowadays it would be unheard of for a major architectural firm not to tackle interiors. But as that necessity developed, then so too did the necessity for good documentation of those interiors. And I have never divided or thought about architectural photography in terms of interior and exterior. It's all architectural photography, whether it's inside or outside, although the rules, of course, are totally different because when you're photographing an interior, not very many subjects that you have to be inside when you're photographing them. And of course, the scale of them is very important. Now I will say that in the days and up to the early 21st century, my four by five view camera was the tool that I used for virtually all of my photography. I might do slides in addition, but the slides were primarily to provide the architect with the ability to have slide shows in addition to photography that was used not only for reference, but for possible publication and other purposes. Now if you think back on it, the four by five camera produced for many purposes probably -- it was probably overkill. I mean it gave you really fantastic quality. You could enlarge these photographs to great size with no problems. And any of you who have come into photography more recently will recognize the fact that with certain systems that are available today that if your end product is a large-scale mural, you're going to have to do it very differently than if you were using it for the projected image. There's a big difference between those two. And I must say that even today I -- since I am a comparative newcomer to the digital world, and I don't -- I'm not a computer expert by any means, that the idea that a file has to be totally different depending on whether it's a projected image or whether it is a printed image is -- it surprises me. Most of the images that you're going to see here started life as much bigger files because the end product at the time that I did them was going to be a print rather than projection. But these days, architects promote themselves almost universally via the website. So these are projected images. And when you think about it, many of the photographs that people take today are -- you take photographs with your cell phone. You take them -- it doesn't matter how you take them. You -- you're not sending prints to your friends. You're sending files that show you with the Lincoln Memorial, whatever it is. But that's what you do, and it's fine for that purpose. But when it comes to a large-scale reproduction, then you have think again. So it means that it's going to be a little bit different. The slide that you see in front of you is the old shed roof of Penn Station. Now when I made that arrangement with Wayman C. Wing, a structural engineer, still around, still goes into his office, although he's now in his mid-90s, Wayman C. Wing did the structure for the Washington Hilton Hotel, and I was resident engineer for part of that work. Prior to that, I had -- when I was still working for my previous firm, I had -- I had worked where? Well, I had been resident engineer for the final phase of the redo of the Capitol Dome, which is now -- it's now been so long that that redo is not being redone yet again.
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So that's how long ago it was. So that came about under a slightly unfortunate -- not for me, but for one of my associates because those of you who are not familiar with the Capitol realize that's it's got an inner and an outer dome and that between the inner and the outer dome is this great structure that holds the whole thing up. And then at the base of the dome, there is this wing, and this is where the balcony is, at that -- it ties the whole thing together. Well, over the years, because of poor waterproofing, but also due to the -- due to bird damage, the -- that part of the dome, which structurally held the thing together, was compromised. This series of laminated plates had corroded badly. You couldn't replace it because to replace it you have to take the top of the dome off. That clearly wasn't feasible and would've indicated weakness on some part. And so --
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So they -- so the company devised a method for -- they introduced a series of saddles around the 36 beams there and put in steel beams or steel cables and then stressed these cables up and relieved these metal plates of all the stress and, thus, reintroduced the integrity of the dome structurally. The reason that I ended up being there, however, was that my predecessor fell inside the dome and badly damaged one of his feet and could no longer continue with that work. So I was lucky enough then to be his replacement. But in any event, so I was -- and this era, I might say, was during the era when Richard Nixon was Vice President. John F. Kennedy had just been selected to be the Democratic candidate for the presidency. Lyndon Johnson was either Speaker of the House, or it was Sam Rayburn. I don't remember the details of how that all worked. But I had a grandstand seat to some of the events that occurred in the capital in that era. So my association with Washington, as you can see, goes back a long way. One sad note was that I was on my way to Washington, DC, when President Kennedy was assassinated. And that was a terrible, terrible time in Washington. But it was even worse for my family because my uncle died on that same weekend. He -- and he died of pneumonia, which had been misdiagnosed in the excitement of everything that was going on and the preoccupation that everybody had. They didn't diagnose the sort of pneumonia that he had until it was too late. So that was a very sad thing, but it was -- it was one of the -- of many Washington events that occurred that were -- had a major impact on me. When I think back to the days of film photography, and I had one assignment in the mid-80s that was a round-the-world trip to do a -- an annual report for the Schlumberger Corporation that had headquarters in New York, Paris, and England. And I had -- because I was going to many different locations in different parts of the world, I had 13 separate pieces of baggage. I didn't know what piece of equipment I was going to need for which part of this job. So I had to take everything with me. When that whole assignment was over, we ended up in some place like Frankfurt. No, it wasn't. No, I -- we ended up in Dubai I think it was. And because the representative from Schlumberger -- we had -- and my assistant -- we had been able to divide our baggage allowance, and we were traveling business class. We were -- we could divide it between three people. Then it was manageable. But at that point, you're going to different destinations. And we had to divide it between two. So they said, "Okay, that's going to be $2500 in excess baggage." Well, the Schlumberger representative had already flown out. So I said, "Well, okay, here's my American Express card." Well, this exceeded the thing. So there I was on the -- I was there waiting to get on the plane, and everybody was seated in the plane. And they said, "Well, you know, what are we going to do here? We've loaded all the baggage on. He's maxed out his credit card. What are we going to do?" The pilot had to come down and intercede and say, "Look, accept the damn credit card and get -- let's get on." [Laughter] And it was really pretty hilarious. In any event, I -- had I to do that same job today, I would not have a fraction of the amount of equipment. This was taken with a -- my first really sophisticated wide-angle camera was not a view camera. It was a camera that used 120 film, and it had a negative two and a half -- two and a half inches by three and a half inches, very, very wide angle. It had a 47 millimeter super angle on it. And it was really quite something. So this is -- this is a little bit before. One of the interesting things about Penn Station that -- first of all, let me point out that the office of Wayman C. Wing was on Seventh Avenue right across from Penn Station. Penn Station became a very important part of my life because I worked across the street from it, and all I had to do was to go up to the top floor of the Pennsylvania Hotel, and I could get a bird's eye view of the hotel -- of the station. The station, of course, was enormous. This is the part of the roof structure that you saw from under -- underneath. [Inaudible] suggested that I should take a course with Alexey Brodovich. Alexey Brodovich was an art director of Harper's Bazaar. Brodovich was influential to many of the top photographers of his era. He encouraged us to produce stories that were unique and that could be discussed by the class. And my set of topic was in fact the -- was Penn Station. The demolition of Penn Station occurred over an almost four-year period, and during that time, the station had to remain completely operative not only for commuters but for long -- as a long-distance railroad hub. So this is a view of the Seventh Avenue facade, which I mean was almost identical to the western facade with all these eagles and things like that. This is obviously before the demolition had started. What I have done more recently, and this is now a retake on all the images that I took back in the '60s, but now what I have done is I have scanned all these images together and made a series of five composites -- six composites. So this takes up lots of different elements, some of which are immediately recognizable, and others are not. And so, this is something that I've only very recently done. And it's a way of clearly looking back on some of this early photography. While it does have meaning as -- simply as a record, I thought that this was a new take and would give it a somewhat more up-to-date feel. So this is a digital take on the demolition of the station. So here you see the base photograph here is an aerial, almost aerial view taken from the top of the -- of the Pennsylvania Hotel. You have the post office building at center background. Yeah, that's right. I've got a point there. Don't I?
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>> I knew I nearly forgot something. Yeah. Up here, you've got the post office. And the base of the final photograph, this is the Seventh Avenue side here. Eighth Avenue is there. So I'm -- here I'm looking west. One of my most recent involvements was -- and we've heard and read an awful lot about drones. So I thought this is the way of introducing -- this is a local store in New York that sells drugs. One of -- one of my fellow architectural photographers in New York is consultant to a group of Chicago that comes and does drone photography. So here is a drone, and it's interesting to speculate. Is, for example, a radio-controlled model aircraft a drone? Why the definition of -- by some people's definition, it might be a drone. But it's remotely controlled. Nobody's in it. Anyhow, this is a 5DR or 5DS camera. This -- the span of that rotor is about six feet. And this is a pretty complicated piece of equipment. It's got -- it can fly for maybe 15 minutes at a time. That doesn't sound like much, but in fact actually it's quite a long time. And what they do is they put this camera on this cradle at the bottom, which rotates as the plane rises. And once it gets to a given altitude, they do a 360-degree sweep. And the camera has a full frame fish eye lens on it. So it doesn't need to take that many images going around, which you can then get a panorama of the sort of view that you would get from one of these needle skyscrapers. One of the things that really surprised me about this, and you can -- for example, this -- that photograph up there, you can fly these things in really very confined spaces. And I mean mind you it was fairly close to about a $20,000 piece of equipment. But it's -- even in the wind and stuff, I was amazed at the degree of control that they could have over things. And -- because I thought it was pretty scary going up in these narrow spaces. And they insisted that this flight be done during the lunch hour so that the -- so that the workers wouldn't be jeopardized. Now don't ask me what the details of the -- whether they had permits to do this thing. I will say these guys were so efficient that they came. They set up. Twenty minutes, they were gone. They had what they needed, and they were gone. So by the time anybody could have complained, I think they were long gone.
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And that may be -- that may be the -- that may be the secret. Now what has -- what happened very recently is that based on photographs of Penn Station there has been a new stage production. And this stage production was partly based on my photography and other photography of the station. So they had a -- they made a set here, and the set -- and they project these different images of the station on the set. So here are the -- here are the two actors. The two actors in this production are a photographer who is documenting the destruction of the station for the Pennsylvania Railroad and this commuter professor. And they initially have a rather antagonist feud, but then finally they become friends. And gradually, the station disappears. So it was -- they spent so much money actually on the set that they did -- had nothing left over for promotion. So unfortunately, I can't say it was a great success from a financial standpoint. Now we have to do this one here because this was taken while I was observing one of these drone flights from the top of the W Hotel just south of Ground Zero. And this, of course, is what was used for the -- for the [inaudible] lecture. And there, this, of course, was at dusk. And this is, of course, the -- what used to be called the Freedom Tower. So here is -- at dusk, here is this drone that was -- that -- and I will say that the -- it had to be at least 20 mile an hour wind. And I would not normally have flown a model plane in that -- in such wind. But these guys took this thing up. They managed to hold it remarkably sturdy and were able to accomplish their objective. And I got, of course, to have the benefit of the marvelous panoramas. There's the drone with the moon in the background. Okay. While we were up there, I suddenly saw lights begin to appear at the base of One World Trade Center. They were doing a test, and apparently, what they have done now is they can transform the lower part of that building into an American flag. And I don't -- and it had -- it hasn't happened since, and this is I think the first time that anybody could record it. So I was just lucky that I was there at the right time. Now this is sort of hot off the press. This is the -- this is the Calatrava Center. That is part of the PATH system that is at Ground Zero. Now I'm a great admirer of Calatrava. This building is very elegant. It cost almost $4 billion, which I -- you know, it just is astounding to me. The thing is I find it oppressively white.
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[ Laughter ]
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I mean I feel like I need snow goggles when I go -- when I go into that building and that -- it only serves about 60,000 commuters a day. So it doesn't handle anything like the sort of traffic that you get through Grand Central Station or anything else. So the -- this is a full-frame fish eye lens from the same view. Now I don't -- I don't normally use fish eye lenses for my architectural work, but in this particular case, it somehow or other captures how this thing does envelope you. But there is a degree of monotony about this, quite frankly. And all the structural elements are all coated with this luscious marble. And I just wonder what -- you know, you just wonder, well what is this is? This is just a glorified passage. I mean they're going to have retail stores and stuff. So, you know, you -- it's interesting to play with these images. And it's an interesting thing to go see once, maybe twice. But I'm just not quite sure --
^M00:47:18
[ Laughter ]
^M00:47:19
That for $4 billion it's worth all the hype.
^M00:47:21
[ Laughter ]
^M00:47:23
Yeah. I mean here -- Yeah. Now here -- here's -- now admittedly, this is a full-frame fish eye lens. So this is not the typical view that you get. And you do -- you do see that the whole of this skyline from one end to another, it's an immense space. But I really feel like there was a -- I remember just on PBS the other night, I watched a program -- oh, no. I went to a show with my wife about -- based on ice fisherman who go, and they -- and you feel like ice fisherman with orange uniforms and stuff like that would be more suitable. Now it's impossible not to compare that transit hub with this one, which is only a ten minutes' walk away, which is the Fulton Street Transit Hub, which is infinitely more -- it's got great variety. It's got -- its materials I think are very interesting. So here is a view up through -- from a lower level. This -- that actually -- that ring there is actually the balustrade around the opening in the floor to the space that I'm photographing. I mean this is a part of a stairway. And then this is oculus of the whole thing. And at different times of day, it looks quite marvelous. I just thought I would just end with that -- with that slide there. This -- she's on post. She just happened to be there. And I just thought, well, gosh, that's pretty appropriate.
^M00:48:54
[ Laughter ]
^M00:48:55
So any of you that haven't, I have not been yet into the museum there. But I think that this design here and the One World Trade Center -- World Financial Center behind here, that's well worth visiting. I can't speak for the museum. It's rather expensive.
^M00:49:16
[ Laughter ]
^M00:49:18
In any event, okay, I'm -- I apologize that our slide show for reasons beyond my control couldn't -- didn't -- is -- was not complete. But you get a hint for I think what I'm still doing, and those of you who have questions, I'll try and answer them.
^M00:49:42
^M00:49:46
[ Applause ]
^M00:49:53
>> Male Speaker: You're shooting these big fish eye pictures. Is it safe to say that earlier in your career, you would not have been [inaudible], that you would have always been more the straightforward architectural --
>> Norman McGrath: Well, what I'm doing a lot more photography for myself these days, and I -- one of the things that I have been doing is doing photographs that I call upshots. And for the upshots, I take -- I will take any -- I will extreme wide-angle lenses, including fish eye lenses, because that gives you a very different view, and yet it -- I mean it's reality, but it's a distorted reality. And it -- you can make very interesting images I think doing that. But whether you do those as part of an assignment, I don't know. You would have to have a client who recognizes that, okay, this is maybe not part of the documentation but nevertheless is an interesting take. It's because, you know, every now and again, that sort of thing will happen. But you have to have a flexible client. You wouldn't do it with just any client. Yeah?
>> Male Speaker: So it seems to me that both architecture and photography have become more classic as we get -- since the advent of purists. And I'm just wondering since you've bridged this gap in a wonderful way how the conversation has changed between architects and architectural photographers. I mean I know that it's easy to be dictated to by the architect in a certain way, especially as their creations become more frothy, you know?
>> N Yeah.
>> Male Speaker: Acrobatic. 
>> Norman McGrath: Yeah. It's an interesting point that you bring up. As I mentioned earlier, many, many architects are -- would be or could be very talented photographers if they had the time and had the equipment to do it. However, when it comes to the documentation of their own work, they usually seek out a photographer with whom they feel compatible and that they understand that once they have worked with a photographer who has gone out and documented something that they have done and that they like it, then they become more trusting. And then they give -- they tend to give the photographer less and less instruction. And that works usually to both the benefit of the photographer and the architect because sometimes an architect doesn't always -- you know, they're so close to the design that they don't necessarily see it objectively. You know, it's an interesting thing. And the other I think very particularly interesting aspect of architectural photography is which is more important, the quality of the architecture or the photograph? And that's an interesting question to pose. And it's surprising that -- and quite a number of instances you get collections of photographs of the work of a particular architect without any acknowledgement of who took those photographs. And yet, they can be -- they can be widely divergent and very different. I personally find that clients who give me more direction end up really -- you know, sometimes, you know, they might say, "Okay, we want it done this way." Okay. You do it that way, but you also do it your own way too, show them the two, and then afterwards, you know what? Your way was better?
^M00:53:44
[ Laughter ]
^M00:53:45
Because you're -- you know, that's really what you do.
>> Male Speaker: And in a way you become a proxy for the first visitor.
>> Norman McGrath: Yeah. Yeah.
>> Male Speaker: This is the first experience, and it's a reflection, I imagine, that some architects don't like held up to them.
>> Norman McGrath: Well, maybe not.
>> Male Speaker: It's a way of showing whether their building succeeds or fails.
>> Norman McGrath: Yeah. Most architects recognize how important the documentation of their buildings is because only a certain proportion of their audience will actually get to see the finished product in many cases. And therefore, they're really seeing it -- they're seeing an interpretation of the design by somebody else. And that person has to be on the same wavelength for that to be successful.
^M00:54:28
^M00:54:33
>> Male Speaker: And those processing [inaudible] now. The building on the left is skewed to the left. Were you -- do you use the post [inaudible] software where it just straightens those buildings up?
>> Norman McGrath: I could have. You're talking about this building?
>> Male Speaker: Correct.
>> Norman McGrath: Yeah. I must admit that I -- one of the things at Ground Zero that you can't do is use tripods. So I have to -- and using a tilt shift lens on a camera and keeping it level is tough. I could have corrected that afterwards. I didn't do so, and I could have.
>> Do you -- okay. But do you do that routinely when you take images?
>> If I were -- if I had done this on assignment for somebody, I certainly would have, yes.
>> Male Speaker: Okay, good. That's what --
>> Norman McGrath: Yeah. Yes, those sort of tech -- it depends on who your audience is. For a general audience, the point of this is, okay, it's a familiar part of Manhattan now. And just the inclusion of this little girl who just rushed into the picture at the last minute, I said, "Wow, [laughter] I got to get that." 
^M00:55:40
^M00:55:44
>> Female Speaker: Well, I think you sort of answered this question in a few ways, but I wanted to ask it again. You used the phrase documentary a number of times. And so -- and you reference it, and this is a good example [inaudible]. How much -- you say an architect might have a vision, and you sort of have a way that you like to shoot. Is the way that you like to shoot to -- is it important to you to have it being documentary so that it's as correct as possible? So you had fun with the fish eye. But as part of your motivation and the photographs that you take that you would like for it to be perspective corrected and that you're trying to make it --
>> Norman McGrath: I just start -- I just -- well, the main --
>> Female Speaker: How does that [inaudible]?
>> Norman McGrath: The main -- yeah. The main objective simply would be to produce a photograph that is comfortable enough that the fewer is not preoccupied with the method that has been used to document the thing in the first place. You know, you -- in other words, when you look at an architectural photographer -- a photograph, you want the viewer to say, "Ooh, that's a great looking building. That's terrific." You don't want them to say, "Wow, I wonder -- that's a marvelous photograph. I wonder how that was done." Then maybe the photographer has overdone it because then the photograph itself becomes more important than the subject. And that's a -- that's one of the -- one of the big quandaries with architectural photography in general. And it's one of the reasons that architectural photographers in general are not as widely known to the general public as photographers in some other fields. 
^M00:57:29
^M00:57:32
Ford?
>> Ford Peatross: Has that client dynamic that you just described over 50 years had any major shifts, or is it still pretty steady?
^M00:57:41
^M00:57:47
>> Norman McGrath: Well, it -- I mean one thing that it has done is that because in fact many even modest sized architectural firms can afford to go out and buy a $3,000 camera like this and a $2,000 lens, you know, $5,000 sounds like a lot of money. But if that permits you to get good quality photographs, then a moderately skilled photographer who is not necessarily professional can go out and capture for an architect photographs which are quite adequate for use on a website or for reference purposes, not necessarily for publication, but maybe I mean if they're good enough, they could be for publication too. So that -- I think architects in general are doing more of their own photography than has been true in the past. They are doing it now because this is an infinitely easier to learn how to use and to use than a four by five view camera ever was.
>> Just a note from the [inaudible], they have to close.
>> Oh, they have to close. Okay.
>> This is official [inaudible] continues. I'm the [inaudible].
^M00:59:08
[ Laughter ]
^M00:59:10
>> Okay.
^M00:59:11
[ Applause ]
^M00:59:14
^M00:59:17
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
^E00:59:23