Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is generally considered one of the most beautiful homes in the world, and for its 75th birthday this year it’s celebrating with a brand new book of photography.
25 years ago, Fallingwater director Lynda Waggoner teamed up with photographer Christopher Little to publish a 50th anniversary commemorative book complete with essays and landscape photographs. Now, she and Little are reuniting for a new perspective on the famous house.
‘Fallingwater: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Romance with Nature’ is a 12 x 12 inch collection of professional photographs and scholarly essays that tells the story of Wright’s amazing architectural design, as well as an examination of the house’s melding of different art forms.
In creating photographs of the estate, Little says he chose digital photography this time around. After getting the right lighting, Little says he combined three different exposures of the same shot: one image under-exposed, one just right and one over-exposed.
“It’s the closest you can get to what the eye sees,” Little explains. “You still see the shadows and highlights, but your perception on a two-dimensional page is what your eyes see in three dimensions.”
Photographer and landscape ethicist Rick Darke also contributed to the new book, crafting a chapter that, Darke says, is designed to evoke the fluid nature of the house itself.
“Frank Lloyd Wright said that the key to the universal is in the incidental,” Darke said. “I reference all that. If you go looking for beds and borders at Fallingwater, you won’t find them. But if you’re looking for a truly immersive experience, you’ll find that in shadow play, in snow and ice, and in moss patterns under frozen waterfalls.”
To see more of Fallingwater, check out Waggoner’s new book here.