John Madere Photography

Ellen Lupton met me early one morning at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, where she is Curator of Contemporary Design. The display case beneath which she is reclining was designed by her husband, Abbott Miller of Pentagram, whose design work was featured in the exhibition Design for a Living World. I scouted the Cooper Hewitt days before, knowing that my assistant and I would be under pressure to finish shooting and leave the museum before it opened. Ellen met us at 7:00 am on the shoot day, quietly sitting on the floor and reading her Kindle while we set up our lighting.

The objects in this case were created  by Dutch designer Hella Jongerius using chicle latex, a natural material that comes from chicozapote trees in the Yucatan Peninsula.

For the exhibition, Ellen commissioned original artworks from ten designers using various sustainably-harvested mediums. . The exhibition featured fascinating creations from prominent designers including Maya Lin, Abbott Miller, Kate Spade, and Isaac Mizrahi.  Hella Jongerius’ beautiful exhibition offered just the right scale and complexity to complement Ellen’s portrait.

Ellen also directs the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.  She has written many, many books and articles on design.

Stephen recently received the 2010 National Design Award for Communication Design.   He and I have worked on a number of projects together in the U.S. and overseas.

I chose the firm’s entrance lobby, lined with acid etched metal, and arranged a few enormous wooden letters from a previous project. He’s holding one of his paper sculptures meticulously cut from the pages of the book Poetry as a Means of Grace.

Stephen rides his bike to work almost every day. For this portrait, he put his Manhattan traffic dodging skills to work and volunteered to teeter, relaxed and unfazed, on top of this old wooden chair.

Tony Brook of the design studio, Spin, and Adrian Shaughnessy were producing a book called Studio Culture They needed photographs of Stephen at Doyle Partners’ design studio and I was able to shoot that the same day that I photographed him for my designer series.

Here are a few of the other scenes I photographed that day.

Detail from the west end of Stephen’s desk.

A corner of the studio: David Byrne poster, packaging for Martha Stewart at Macy’s, Angela.

Typographic treatments.

Entrance to the studio.

Twig type, tower of matches, pixel collage, color chips, plaster teeth.

Paper stairs, cast glass numeral, digital dollar, plaster book.

Stephen at his desk with a few of his favorite things.