A Conversation with Trent Bell
Famed architectural photographer Trent Bell and Toby shared in an engaging conversation about “the art of living well”, photography, and Supersizing Bliss on Trent’s podcast AD&P - architecture, design & photography.
AD&P - Episode #99: The Art of Living Well: Toby Witte on Creating Impactful Spaces
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Some Excerpts
Toby: “All I get to do is to ask questions, wonder, and probe, and hope I find design ideas, design solutions, design paths, that will have a positive benefit for my clients. I discover with them and the house, their home.
It is, for me, a kind of probing, pushing on them, on their memories, on their stories, on their ideas, their truth - to pull things, long forgotten things out of them, and see where it takes us, and then be blown away.”
Trent: “Something from nature that applies directly to the point you're making, I believe, is how you outlined the sexy things in-between the spaces, like the edge of a forest and a field. Yes. My son's a big nature photographer, and that's where you find the most interactions is between the ecosystems.”
Toby: “For me, that's architecture. The most important part is creating spaces. You put all of these things into the world, elements, materials, to really create the spaces in between, this incorporeal thing that is hard to describe - it’s nothingness, it’s air, if you will - but is defined by the textures, by the material, by the structures, by the proportions, by the design, by the pieces you put around it.”
“The most important part is creating spaces.”
Trent: “ That’s such a hard thing to photograph. […] Being faced with that is a perplexing thing when you first run into it. But as you as you described, the outlining of that thing - you're making real boundaries to make a space for this ephemeral relationship, life, weird things going on, that's the actual importance - and you're doing the boundary around it. It's a difficult thing to really conceptualize. And do well, honestly. How to photograph that. [..]
How I interact now with photographing the interior of a space is that, for one, the emotion - I've done it enough, and the feeling comes just like a key that doesn't turn, doesn't turn, doesn't, and then all of a sudden it turns. I can just - oh, that's it, right there. […]. To me, it is informed by interesting foreground, middle subject, and background qualities. It's informed by the vignetting, the forming of the attention on where you're looking in the frame. But then most importantly, you have to consider the viewer.”
Toby: “It's asking for something beyond just the shelter. It's asking for me to create something that is pristine and special and a reflection of me and how I want to live, [as a] piece of art, as something gorgeous, as something different, as something specific that meets my life in a specific and certain way. […] And so it is a luxury, it's a luxury of being, and I think it's important. Our entire conversation today holds down onto our sense of existence, it's very existential, if you will, it's about our understanding of ourselves, our being in the world. And so if I'm going as far as creating a space, a place, a piece of architecture just for myself, me or my partner or one more kid, then I need to understand it is luxury, and it's a good luxury. It's a luxury that is needed, that should be addressed, but it should be addressed on those terms then. So do it right, and bring the quality to it that it's asking for.”