The Chair That Ruined the Photograph

Sometimes it is the chair.

Not an ugly chair.

Not a badly placed chair.

In fact, it may be an exceptionally beautiful chair sitting exactly where the interior designer intended it to sit.

And then I put the camera on the tripod.

Suddenly, the chair has joined forces with the cocktail table, the floor lamp is growing out of the sofa, and a perfectly innocent vase appears to be balancing on the back of another piece of furniture.

Welcome to photographing interiors.

The Camera Flattens Everything

We experience rooms in three dimensions.

We walk through them. Our eyes move around objects. We instinctively understand that the chair is six feet in front of the console table and that the lamp behind it isn’t actually attached to either one.

The camera isn’t nearly so accommodating.

It takes all those layers and compresses them into a single two-dimensional frame.

Objects that have plenty of breathing room in real life can suddenly collide.

This is why I often make small adjustments before photographing a room.

A chair moves three inches.

A lamp shifts slightly.

A bowl disappears.

And occasionally something lovely gets temporarily banished to the hallway.

Not because the room was designed incorrectly.

Because the photograph has its own geometry.

Three Inches Can Change Everything

One of the misconceptions about architectural and interior photography is that the photographer simply finds a good corner and photographs what is there.

But much of the work happens before the shutter is ever released.

I am watching edges.

Spacing.

Sightlines.

Where furniture overlaps.

How one room appears through another.

What the eye notices first—and what quietly gets in its way.

Sometimes the difference between a photograph that feels effortless and one that feels strangely cluttered is remarkably small.

Three inches can do it.

Then Everything Goes Back

This is the funny part.

After carefully moving a chair, shifting a lamp and relocating the offending bowl, I make the photograph.

And then I put everything back.

Because the designer wasn’t wrong.

The camera was just being difficult.

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