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A husband who loves his wife to excess is called uxorious, but where is the word to describe the homeowner with an extravagant love for his house?
It is a passion particularly prevalent in the Hamptons, where so many weekday apartment dwellers seek an outlet for their dreams of domesticity on a country estate. If “house-proud” is too cynical a term for their authentic devotion, “homebody” doesn’t begin to describe the pleasure they take in living their dream and, yes, inspiring admiration and perhaps even envy in others.
Nothing is permanent, however, and like the uxorious husband who hangs his beloved’s portrait over the mantel to freeze her beauty in time and remind future generations of her charmed existence, lovesick homeowners have long turned to portraiture to capture and preserve a house in its prime.
Before the advent of photography, there were drawings and paintings and even today some artists carry on the tradition, among them artist Richard Mizdal, whose paintings of some of the Hamptons’ most handsome homes are the prized possessions of those who have commissioned them.
These days, though, photographers are most often called upon for house portraits that capture a home’s unique character or for albums that document in loving detail the many charms of a beloved domain.
The inspiration was surely the same when someone in the Hildreth family asked an artist for a portrait of the family’s original house in Mecox, built in 1690 and demolished around 1873. A likeness of “Home Sweet Home” in East Hampton as it looked in 1870 is another reminder that without owners enamored of their homes and artists to paint their portraits, most of the area’s early dwellings would be lost to memory, as would the original look of those few that have survived.
In the late 19th and early 20th century when the first waves of wealthy New Yorkers were setting down summer roots in the Hamptons, they liked to contrast the
“modesty” of their “cottages” with the pretentious marble palaces of Newport. Modesty being a relative term, they were soon applying it to summer homes of gargantuan proportions, mansions that no shingled exterior could conceivably disguise. Nor did modesty prevent them from allowing handsome portraits of their homes to appear on penny postcards.
The year 1905 saw the beginning of what collector Eric Woodward has called “a total craze” as millions of postcards were sent through the mail. Surprisingly, in this age when the emphasis on privacy borders on paranoia, the images carried on many of those postcards were of the era’s most prominent summer estates. Some were the work of itinerant photographers; others were taken by local amateurs. One such image, the Italian Renaissance-style mansion built for one A.B. Boardman and torn down 10 years later, offers evidence of the turn tastes took in 1920s Southampton toward more opulent dwellings. Likewise, the Mediterranean villa built for Standard Oil heir H.H. Rogers, “Black Point,” an image of which appears on a postcard that was apparently available to all at Corwith’s Pharmacy.
Though her primary interest was on location photography for designers, architects and landscape architects, Mattie Edwards Hewitt’s photographs of houses and gardens in the 1920s and 1930s are prized as art works today by museums and collectors. At the time she was active, almost as much attention was being lavished on the gardens of the grand estates as on the mansions themselves and Ms. Hewitt’s willingness to visit and photograph was a badge of honor for homeowners and a guarantee that a record of one’s impeccable taste and obvious prosperity would be left for posterity.
Gissa Bu, the elaborate Nordic Lodge that aviation titan (and uxorious husband) Lamotte T. Cohu built for his Norwegian-born wife in Shinnecock Hills received Hewitt’s admiring attention, as did the opulent gardens at “The Orchard,” the James Lawrence Breese estate in Southampton. Landscaping for the mansion, a masterwork from the firm McKim, Mead & White, was originally designed by the Olmsted Brothers, then tinkered with by both Breese and his pal Stanford White.
It is tempting to speculate on whether Hewitt, who was known to eschew the kind of photographic exaggeration that is calculated to flatter a landscape, was ever nudged to deviate from her principles by Breese or White, neither of whom had a reputation for modesty.
Jeff Heatley, who is well known in the Hamptons for his photographs of some of the area’s most impressive architecture, says he has handled some private commissions for homeowners, but acknowledges that his preference for working slowly and deliberately—often making repeated return trips to a house over long stretches of time—limits his pool of potential clients to those who possess as much patience as money and taste.
“If somebody wants photographs—a good character shoot of a house with pictures of some emotive value—there is a way to do it that can be worked out,” he said. He stressed that, for him, the most important requirement for capturing the character of a house with his camera is to wait for the right light. The light is good in December and great in June, he said, offering an insight into why some photographic assignments might ideally require access over not just weeks, but months.
“Some things look better at certain times,” he said. While architects can appreciate that, he has found that homeowners don’t always get it.
Still, Mr. Heatley expressed amazement that there is not more interest in home portraits, “given the great work being done on landscaping and the houses themselves.”
James Lowney, whose day job is at Reed’s Photo in Amagansett, has received a number of private commissions for house portraits, including a memorable shoot for a homeowner who sold his house in East Hampton for $10 million but still felt some seller’s remorse.
“He had three or four months to move out,” said Mr. Lowney, who was commissioned to photograph “the whole thing” so that the owner would have a visual reminder of his lost love.
It’s possible, Mr. Lowney conceded, that it might have served another purpose as well. “I guess you could show it off to your friends in the city,” he said.
Mr. Lowney has shot homes that are hidden by hedges from high in the sky on a cherrypicker. Like Mr. Heatley, he waits as long as it takes “to have the right day, the right lighting, the right sky. You have to go back quite a few times,” he said, awaiting the day when all the variables are aligned—“the lighting, the time of day, the time of year, the foliage.”
Mr. Lowney charges homeowners anywhere from $300 to $3,000, depending on how much work is involved.
For James Bleecker, private commissions are not just a sideline, they are his specialty and, unlike Mr. Heatley, he is partial to working with homeowners. A self-described artist-photographer, Mr. Bleecker has happily photographed in the Hamptons for architect Peter Cook, but his real love is producing house portraits that will become family heirlooms.
“Architects have specific needs,” he explained. “They don’t want a photographer to impose his sensibility on his work. After all,” he laughed, “the architect is the artist.”
By contrast, when a photographer is working for a homeowner, “the only agenda is to portray their property in the most flattering and appealing way,” he said. “Even more than that, they want an artist to convey the spirit of their property. That is why I love this work,” Mr. Bleecker said.
Mr. Bleecker’s reputation is such that his prices start at $10,000 and can reach $50,000 or more. He launched his career 25 years ago doing private commissions for historical societies and preservation groups in the Hudson Valley. His photographs were praised for their technical perfection and compositional rigor and when he landed a commission to photograph the restoration of the Rockefeller family compound at Pocantico Hills, his career took off.
The forms his artistry takes are as varied as the clients who commission them, he said.
“Some ask for a book, some ask for large framed prints.”
He has had clients who went for an elegant boxed set of matted prints and seemed to have as much fun choosing the opulent materials for the box as they did selecting the prints. Ours is undeniably a house-proud era, he conceded, noting that though he has occasionally been asked to do family portraits, “honestly, most people really want to have their houses photographed.” And for most of them, he added, “it’s not just the house, it’s the landscape as well.”
Indeed, recent clients asked for a boxed set of prints featuring their garden, “and nothing but the garden. For them the house is an afterthought.”
Yet, Mr. Bleecker was quick to affirm that his clients’ motives are more complex than one might imagine.
“You would be selling people short if you concluded that they do it to show off,” he said. “They don’t. Every client that I have had has considered this a labor of love. The most flattering comment I hear from clients is, ‘We will pass this down through our family.’”
There is, of course, also the do-it-yourself option, considerably cheaper than hiring Mr. Bleecker and easier than ever before now that digital cameras have, for all practical purposes, made the complexities of f-stops and film types a thing of the past.
“Digital has put the joy back in photography in many ways,” said Mr. Heatley. Cameras are more “user-friendly” and the changes have made it so that anyone “can concentrate on composition and light.”
And sometimes less really is more. For less than $20, one amateur photographer, preparing to move on from a house that had been the family home for nearly three decades, created an album that makes up for whatever it lacks in professional finesse with a very personal selection of images that trigger fond memories: the four-square in the snow with a wreath on the door, the shed in spring with its wisteria in bloom, the lopped tree on the far side of the road with the farm field behind it, the pooch chilling out in the kitchen. Priceless.
on May 19, 2008