The Journal Times Online - Racine, Wisconsin

Bank photos (c) David Kennedy

Portrait of David Kennedy (c) Keith Kennedy

    Banks were once among the most important buildings in a community, as important as the city hall, the post office, and the court house.  Though Louis Sullivan is well known to many people because he designed great, big buildings in big cities, he also designed a number of great small banks in small towns across the Midwest.

    Bill Menner has published a well-illustrated survey of  the eight Sullivan banks, focusing on the Merchants National Bank in Grinnell, Iowa, Menner’s hometown (Louis Sullivan’s Merchants National Bank, San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2007).

    I became interested in the book when I learned that Menner had hired David Kennedy to illustrate it. I was not disappointed, and neither was Menner, “There’s a number of wonderful books other there that feature the building that use black and white, but Sullivan needs to be shared in color, and he (Kennedy) took that challenge and ran with it. David was the star.

    “The more I saw of the stuff he was doing on his own, the non S&B (student newspaper) work, I thought David really had a strength when it came to capturing buildings, capturing places, and capturing accessories and ornament. That is exactly what this book called for.”

    Kennedy has a fine feeling for making existing light work to highlight the features of his subjects. He used sunlight and the bank’s lighting effectively to emphasize the terra cotta, stained glass, and other features of the bank.

    I met Kennedy in May, 2002, when he was a high school senior. Our newspaper photo department welcomes area students to job shadow us. He was a student at The Prairie School when he accompanied me on an assignment at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wingspread. He enrolled at Grinnell College the next year. He self-published a striking collection of photos of the campus (A Portrait of Grinnell: The Architecture and Landscape of Grinnell College, 2006). Those campus photos prompted Menner to invite Kennedy to photograph the Grinnell bank.

    “I got an e-mail out of the blue from him, basically asking, would you be interested in meeting me for coffee? I have a book proposal,” Kennedy recalls. “I remember getting the e-mail, and thinking, ‘Boy that would be cool.’”
    
    They chatted over coffee. “I was a cheap date,” says Kennedy.  Menner proposed that Kennedy work on the project the next year, his senior year (2005-2006). He says Menner “had a great sales pitch. ‘We know the people who work at the bank.’ He was saying we'll get really great access. ‘We can go in when no one is there. I’m think of renting a lift.’  Sure enough he did it. It was really a fantastic opportunity. Of course I said yes!”

David Kennedy at Lower Antelope Canyon in Page, Arizona

 
        Kennedy worked from Menner’s shooting script and added some of his own photos. He used the project as an excuse to buy himself a 24 mm tilt shift lens, a lens used in architectural photography to help eliminate the distorted lines that can be caused when a photographer shoots a building at an upward or downward angle.

    The pictures were all taken with existing light. “For the interior, my biggest concern was going in at times when the sun was behind the glass, so that all the stained glass would really pop.” Kennedy was limited in when he could shoot good pictures. “It's never really gloomy in there, but certain times of day, particularly mornings are better, because other times, it has kind of a pink pastel look to it, which is also pretty. When the sun is out, it really glows. It is really magnificent. You only really get that fairly early in the morning, not too early in the
morning, kind of 9-10.”

    He did not always get to pick when he could shoot, however.  “It’s too bad for the cover image when they put me in a cherry picker, we couldn’t pick the time of day to do it. The city lent us the picker, and they picked the time of day when it was convenient. For them, it was 11 a.m., when it was kind of flat (lighting). It’s kind of hard to tell the city we need it at 8 o’clock.”

    Kennedy thought he had better frames for the cover than the one that was published. “I was surprised they picked that one (particular photo). I had nicer ones from the street, but you can’t win them all.” But he was happy with the rest of the book, particularly the back cover.

    Menner is delighted with the variety of lift pictures that Kennedy shot. “(He) took a picture of the Sullivan stained glass from that eye level perspective you’re never going to see otherwise. We put him in a city bucket truck out front...the parapet at the top, the finials which duplicate some of the terra cotta on the interior. It took David getting up in the bucket truck and getting at that eye level the terra cotta ornament that really defines the bank.