Working for Gensler in the 1990s and 2000s meant stepping into a world where scale was everything. Their projects were vast, ambitious, and global in reach: New York, Boston, London, Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Kuwait. These were businesses that graced the pages of the Financial Times, a roll call of the forces shaping the financial and technical revolutions of the late twentieth century.
To photograph in that era, on large-format film, was to shoulder not just responsibility but weight in the most literal sense. Cameras were heavy, lighting was vast, lenses and holders awkward to pack and even harder to carry through airports and across continents. The process demanded physical endurance as much as visual acuity. Every frame came at a cost of effort, time, and patience.
There was no digital screen to reassure you, no instant transmission to a client, no helpful Google if you were stuck. Each image was an act of faith. Exposures were judged by experience, by reading the light, by trusting how the emulsion would interpret it. Then came the long journey back, through customs, through chemical processing, before the transparencies would reveal whether that judgment had been correct. Slow, unforgiving, exacting.
And yet, it was precisely the difficulty that shaped us. The stubbornness, the hard edges, the discipline, all instilled resilience. Craft, in that sense, was inseparable from struggle. To make the photograph was to overcome, and each obstacle surmounted lent the final image a kind of gravitas.
Most of all, it was never a solitary endeavour. Working with Gensler meant being part of a vast, coordinated effort. The projects themselves were collaborations between hundreds of minds; my role as photographer was to fold into that ecosystem. The work was too big, too complex, for ego to thrive. Success came only when the team moved in step, when the shared commitment to the project’s vision overrode fatigue and endless logistics.
Of course, as digital arrived I was only too keen to embrace its possibilities: fast, precise, light, compact. I could make an image as quickly as I could see it, without complex filtering, lighting, or metering. I moved on, and so did my client base. I was eager to work with ambitious new teams like AHMM, who were building businesses and reputations on a new look, a new sensibility.
But looking back, I sometimes wonder whether digital convenience, for all its power, has dulled that sharpened edge, the necessity of effort as a crucible of character. In those days, nothing came easily, but everything felt hard-won. And in that hard-won quality lay a certain dignity.
My work now treads the fine edge between productivity and invested time, allowing experience and careful consideration to shape images with intent. Do I miss those elaborate set-ups, painstaking compositions, terrifyingly complex calculations?
I think, yes, perhaps I do.
