Corporate HQ

Looking at the recent images from Bob & Russ gives me the perfect opportunity to showcase one of my favorite assignment images across the span of my career. I’d been hired by the corporate magazine of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, Illume, which is published semi-annually and sent to those in Japanese society whom TEPCo thinks influential:  government officials, academics, leaders of business and industry, etc.  You may request a subscription but you may not get one, however if TEPCo wants you to have their magazine it will simply arrive in your mailbox. Illume focuses on the relationship between creativity and progress.  They were very interested in a management principle known as functional inconvenience, which posits that if employees from different disciplines are placed together rather than organized by departmental function, though it may be inconvenient, when you seat an engineer next to a marketing guy, a designer and a finance person, their interaction inevitably sparks innovation. The functional inconvenience model is most notably practiced at the corporate headquarters of the Steelcase Corporation, manufacturers of office furniture and modular office interiors, and so I was sent to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to make photographs to illustrate an article about Steelcase. There were many aspects to the story to be illustrated over the week I spent there, but the art director made special mention of the fact that he wanted dramatic images of the building’s exterior, all the more interesting because it’s a pyramid.  I made more than 40 images of the pyramid that week and though there were opportunities for drama all over the place, I struggled to see this differently.  Using a reflection in a pond, showing the building upside down, was a highly unusual technique that my client appreciated. The image posted today achieved not only my objective of the moment, but dovetails nicely with both Bob’s image (shape of the  grass) and Russ’s image (pyramid shape).