Wayne Thom: Photographing the Late Modern

For a long time the architecture of the 1970s was the stuff nobody wanted to defend. The mirror-glass towers, the cavernous atrium hotels, the corporate slabs that shoved aside the warmth of mid-century modern all got filed under excess and forgotten. Wayne Thom photographed that architecture at the exact moment it believed in itself, and this monograph argues that both the buildings and the man who shot them deserve another look.

Thom was the house photographer for Late Modernism on the West Coast. Architects like William Pereira, César Pelli, and John Portman handed him their glass-skinned experiments, and his images became how the public first met those buildings. He worked when architectural photography was still the main way a design traveled beyond the people standing in front of it.

He came to the work by an unlikely route, a Shanghai-born immigrant who learned the craft in Canada before setting up in Los Angeles just as the glass towers went vertical. He arrived exactly when the West Coast wanted to photograph itself as the future. The timing handed him a subject that suited his cool, exacting eye.

His signature move was to let the buildings dissolve into their own reflections. A Thom photograph of a mirrored facade is often half sky, clouds and neighboring towers sliding across the glass until the structure reads as something between object and mirage. The reflected sky does the emotional work, turning a corporate box into a slab of moving weather, selling not the building but the mood around it.

His Los Angeles is a city of hard sun and harder edges, and he used both. Where an East Coast photographer might soften a facade, Thom let the California light detonate off the glass, so a tower reads less as a structure than as a mirror aimed at the heavens.

Pause on his shots of Pelli's Pacific Design Center, the vast blue-glass wedge that Angelenos nicknamed the Blue Whale. He made its bulk look weightless, a slab of sky set down in a low-rise neighborhood, and the photographs did more to sell the design than any drawing could.

Look, too, at his images of Portman's atrium hotels, those vertigo-inducing interior voids ringed with exposed elevators. He shoots up through them until the geometry turns kaleidoscopic, a machine-age cathedral built for conventioneers. The photographs make you feel the buildings' confidence, which is exactly what the architecture wanted and exactly what later critics held against it.

There is a plain lesson here about photographing to a client's ambition. Thom's pictures are unmistakably commercial, made to flatter architects and fill portfolios, and they are also genuinely good, which is a harder combination than it sounds. An architect finishes a building and needs it to look inevitable, aspirational, deserving of its budget, and the photographer is hired to manufacture that inevitability.

Some of these buildings owe their reputations partly to him. A design that reads as ungainly at street level can look visionary through his lens, and editors chose which projects to canonize based on images like these. The photographer was, in effect, a quiet co-author of the era's standing.

The monograph has the shape of an archive more than a story. Emily Bills supplies serious scholarship, but the reading experience can flatten into one sleek reflective surface after another, and a viewer without much appetite for Late Modernism may tire before the argument fully lands. The pleasures are real. They are also specialized.

What survives is the record of a photographer who took an unloved style seriously enough to make it beautiful. Thom believed those surfaces earned the effort; the pictures are the evidence.