Landscape With Artifact

This past October, I traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to meet a man named Timothy Hursley. Hursley is one of the foremost architectural photographers in America, and his portfolio includes images of buildings by Frank Gehry, Moshe Safdie, and I.M. Pei. These photos aim to understand and render visible the architect’s intent: the play of light on a cornice, the shadows of a sunset on a facade. Yet if Hursley’s work is subtle, it’s also essential and beautiful. For many people, the only time they will ever see one of, say, Gehry’s or Safdie’s buildings—most of which are scattered far apart across America and the world—is in a Hursley photo. In other words, when you look at a piece of art by one of America’s famed architects, you’re often, unknowingly, also looking at a work of art by Timothy Hursley.

Mild-mannered—and almost Zen-like—Hursley is the consummate obsessive photographer. On an average workday, he will log fourteen hours of shooting.

When you are with Hursley, discovery lurks around every corner or, at least, past the next stoplight. As soon as he sees something he would like to photograph, he will park the car, methodically set up his tripod, and, almost without a sound, begin shooting. He is so stealthy, he almost disappears into the scene. This contrasts to the way he shoots buildings for architects, which requires hours, perfect lighting, and loads of cumbersome equipment. Both processes are formulaic and meticulous, but the noncommercial work, Hursley says, “brings him a certain amount of joy” that his other work doesn’t.

Since he picked up a camera in his late teens, Hursley has been drawn to taking pictures of humble environments: brothels in Nevada, polygamist communities in Utah, and, of late,  funeral homes and weatherworn farm equipment.

On the day I visit him, he allows me to join him on a mission to photograph a silo in Hale County, Alabama. Hursley explains that in addition to wanting to photograph the structure, he had also decided to buy it (for $2,000): “To save it from being discarded for scrap-metal parts.”

Hursley’s battered 1999 Ford Explorer is littered with empty cigarette packs and film packaging. Along with us is Hursley’s former assistant, Nathan Kirkman—Hursley wants Kirkman’s help setting up a surveillance camera to photograph and transmit images of the silo and the surrounding landscape on the Internet.

“On its face, this all does sound crazy,” says Hursley, who is wearing a faded green coat and has a neat goatee and ashen-white hair, “until you see the landscape that surrounds the silo.”

Hursley says that when he first spotted the silo, “It spoke to me.” To him, it is a piece of sculpture, and by capturing hundreds of thousands of images on a surveillance camera and broadcasting them on the Internet, he hopes to share the beauty of this “sculpture” with viewers who will never come to Greensboro, Alabama.

Yet, as we near the silo and park at a home nearby, the structure stands flaccid, broken in half by the weather and shadowing the landscape. It doesn’t look like much.

“It sort of reminds me,” Hursley says, “of something out of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.”

Hursley got his start back in suburban Detroit, where he grew up. His brother worked as an assistant for the Hungarian architectural photographer Balthazar Korab, and, as a teenager, Hursley raked the leaves in Korab’s yard, “but it ended up a photo apprenticeship. I developed an abstract style, which I took into architecture. My time with Korab—throughout most of the ’70s—those were my formative years.”

After moving to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1980, Hursley—whose brother, Greg, at one time was also an architectural photographer working in Arkansas—set up his photo studio, The Arkansas Office. But not everyone agreed with his decision to move South. “Korab told me I was leaving a prestigious studio for the boonies,” Hursley says. “But I’ve always held a deep gratitude for his mentorship and the window into the world of architecture and photography he provided.”