Photographing Architect Jeanne Gang - Commercial Portrait
Some subjects arrive with a body of work so substantial that the challenge isn't finding an angle - it's deciding which one to honor. Jeanne Gang is that kind of subject.
Gang is the founding partner of Studio Gang, the architecture and urban design practice behind some of the most recognized buildings in the world: the 82-story Aqua Tower in Chicago, the Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History, a new United States Embassy in Brazil. She's a MacArthur Fellow, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and one of TIME Magazine's most influential people in the world. When I got the call to photograph her, I wasn't thinking about any of that. I was thinking about light, and about how to make a portrait that could travel.
The shoot
Jeanne Gang is someone who moves between contexts constantly - lecture halls, construction sites, museum openings, university commencements. The portrait needed to work in all of those settings. That means clean, confident, and specific enough to be her without being so styled that it reads as a particular moment or mood.
As an editorial portrait photographer, that's the brief I find most interesting: make something that holds up across uses, across publications, across years. A portrait that's too tied to a single aesthetic tends to age quickly. One that's rooted in the person tends not to.
Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
The portrait was selected as the hero image for the Nieuwe Instituut's event page for An Evening With: Jeanne Gang - a talk held in May 2024 in which Gang joined the museum's director, Aric Chen, to discuss sustainability, architectural grafting, and her recently published book. The Nieuwe Instituut is the Netherlands' national museum for architecture, design, and digital culture. Having a portrait placed there, credited, as the primary image for a public program of that caliber, is exactly the kind of placement that matters to me.
Portrait of Jeanne Gang as published on Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam - "An Evening With: Jeanne Gang," May 2024, (also published in Dutch).
Simple. Clean. Exactly right.
Harvard Gazette
My portrait of Jeanne Gang also appeared in the Harvard Gazette in a September 2023 piece on her design of the Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History - one of her most celebrated recent projects. The Gazette is the official news publication of Harvard University, and the credit is mine.
University of Illinois - a commencement announcement
Gang is an alumna of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she studied architecture. In early 2024, the university named her as their commencement speaker - a significant announcement, covered widely. My portrait was selected as the lead image on the university's official news release.
It's a different context from a museum event page or an art publication - institutional, broad-audience, tied to a milestone moment in the university's calendar. But the demands on the portrait are the same: it has to be immediately legible, it has to carry authority, and it has to represent someone who has accomplished enough that the image needs to keep up. That's the standard I work to regardless of who the client is.
Editorial portrait of architect Jeanne Gang, published by the University of Illinois - 2024 commencement speaker announcement
What Commercial Portrait Photography Actually Requires
Photographing architects is its own discipline within commercial portrait photography. The temptation is always to put them in front of their work - and sometimes that's the right call. But Gang's practice is global and varied enough that no single building could stand in for it. What I was after instead was the quality of mind: the focus, the precision, the sense of someone genuinely thinking at scale.
That's an intangible, and making it legible in a still image is the job of a commercial photographer. It requires the subject's trust, enough time to let the performative layer drop, and a clear point of view about what you're actually trying to show.
Working across contexts
One thing this project reinforced for me is that a strong portrait lives beyond its original assignment. The Nieuwe Instituut found this image and chose it for a program in Rotterdam. The University of Illinois reached for it for a commencement announcement in Champaign. Neither of those was the original context - and that's the point.
When the work is done well, it keeps working.
If you're looking for a commercial photographer in San Francisco for architectural or institutional portraits- or need portraits that are built to travel across publications and institutional contexts - I'd be glad to talk.
Marc Olivier Le Blanc is a San Francisco-based editorial and commercial portrait photographer. His work has been published by the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), the University of Illinois, Art Basel, ARTnews, Georgetown Business magazine, and more.
