When a project finishes—especially when it’s late and over-budget—it’s sorely tempting to wrap up the final deficiency review, share beverages with your team, and get on to the clean slate of whatever your Hot Next Project is. Fast forward a few months (or a few years)...
Suddenly, you get a phone call from the editor of your favourite design magazine, wondering if you have something that’s going to fit an upcoming issue. Or, perhaps you finally find the time to go through your past projects and update your website, or start a new social media campaign. You start racking your brain, trying to remember back to your projects from years back, and seeing if something might happen to fit the bill for whatever your editor—or your newly-hired social media coordinator—wants you to provide.
Recently, we’ve had a number of “old projects” get published: a project we photographed in 2014 will soon be part of a Rizzoli coffee table on wine country architecture.
That’s been in the works for about two years now. Earlier last year, a house we photographed for a local builder a few years back became a five-page spread in a special issue of Westcoast Homes and Design that came out for the Fall Home Show last October. It still looked quite fresh and new even several years later. And lest you think that only big, showy projects age well: this meticulously designed tiny bathroom designed by Toula Favreau at Acanthus Interiors showed up in the 2020 Kitchens and Bathrooms issue of
Canadian Home Trends, a few years after we photographed it.
Changes in design trends can also be a good opportunity to plumb the depths of one’s archive: we’ve recently had editors asking us for (particularly) kitchens that are “anything but all white”, and we’re happy to oblige...with projects we photographed a few years ago before Everything Went Neutral. Yes, everything old is new again.
But what if you have the perfect project...but you didn’t get it professionally photographed? You’re probably not out of luck! If your clients have kept to your design vision (or you can work with or work around what they’ve done), perhaps it’s time for a visit? This can not only give you excellent photos for future work, but also give you some fine opportunities to go back and learn from past work. As Stewart Brand and others are fond of saying: buildings learn over time, and seeing how your clients actually use your projects can give you some great ideas that will influence your future design work.
Starting tomorrow, we’ll first talk about reusing photographs from projects you’ve had photographed, and then we’ll talk about some best practices in photographing past projects.