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Photographing the Japanese Friendship Garden with Frank Lloyd Wright on My Mind
By Andrew Pielage
I have photographed the interiors and exteriors of 177 Frank Lloyd Wright designs as part of the #500fllwproject, my long-term visual archive dedicated to capturing Wright’s remaining architectural legacy. The project has taken me around the country for more than fifteen years.
Meanwhile, the Japanese Friendship Garden of Phoenix has been sitting just a mile from my house. I had been there many times and always loved it, but mostly as a visitor. Recently, I returned in collaboration with the Garden, camera in hand, and spent several days photographing it through changing light, from sunrise through the middle of the day and into sunset.
Before I make a single photograph, as with all my shoots, I like to scout first. I walked the entire Garden with Ben Schrepf, its Executive Director and Curator. As Ben began explaining the Japanese design principles built into the Garden, something immediately clicked. I recognized so many of them—not because I had studied Japanese gardens, but because I had spent years photographing Frank Lloyd Wright.
That distinction is important.
Japanese art was one of only three things Wright said taught him to see, along with his mentor Louis Sullivan and the Froebel wooden building blocks he played with as a child. Wright collected Japanese woodblock prints throughout his life, and he described his 1905 trip to Japan as being made “in pursuit of the print.”
For someone who has spent so much of my own life trying to understand how Wright saw the world, that connection is fascinating.
But I also came to it backwards.
The principles I recognize through Wright existed in Japanese art and gardens centuries before him. Wright didn’t simply copy those ideas. He studied them, absorbed them, and eventually developed his own architectural language around many of the same ways of seeing nature, space, movement, and composition.
Photographing the Japanese Friendship Garden gave me an opportunity to look at some of those ideas closer to their source—and at the same time reconsider Wright through a different lens.
Hide and Reveal
Entering a Frank Lloyd Wright design is a curated experience.
Wright rarely gives you everything at once. He gives you glimpses—an opening, a sliver of landscape, or light pulling you toward the next space. A passage may compress so you move through it more quickly, then suddenly open into a space that makes you slow down.
The Garden does much the same thing.
Ben showed me how views are deliberately hidden along the path and then revealed at specific moments. You turn a corner and suddenly encounter water, a lantern, a tree, or an entire composition that wasn’t visible a few steps earlier.
You are being led through a sequence rather than simply walking from one place to another.
As a photographer, I find that incredibly interesting because photography works in much the same way. Every frame is an act of deciding what to reveal, what to leave out, and where to direct someone’s eye.
The Garden is already doing that before I ever lift the camera.
Stones That Move You
The stones were one of the biggest surprises for me.
Of course I could see that they were carefully composed. What I hadn’t fully understood was how much they influence the way you physically move through the Garden.
Ben showed me places where a stone subtly encourages you to step to one side, pause, or turn toward a view you might otherwise have walked past. The path is making decisions for you without ever feeling like it is telling you what to do.
Again, I immediately thought of Wright.
At Taliesin West, for example, Wright can make a passage narrow, low, or darker exactly where he wants you to keep moving. Then, when he wants you to stop, the architecture expands, and the view opens.
One uses stone and gravel. The other uses walls, ceilings, openings, and shadow.
But both understand that design isn’t simply something we look at. It is something we move through and experience.
And as photographers, we have to understand that movement before we can decide on our composition.
Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin
Blur the Line Between Nature and Design
One of the things that originally pulled me from landscape photography toward photographing Wright was the way his architecture refuses to separate itself from nature.
Wright carries materials from exterior to interior, borrows colors from the landscape, frames views, and sometimes incorporates the land itself directly into the architecture.
The Japanese Friendship Garden approaches that same relationship without needing a building at all.
Stone, plants, water, shadow, and light are composed together until the line between what is natural and what has been designed becomes difficult to define.
That relationship is at the center of so much of my photography.
I’m not simply photographing architecture or landscape. I’m interested in what happens when the two begin interacting with one another—when light, weather, season, or vegetation becomes as important to the image as the structure itself.
The Garden gave me an entirely different place to explore that idea.
Working With the Light
Light is the real subject of my photography.
One of the things I loved learning about the Garden is how intentionally light and shadow are considered within it. Trees are pruned not only for their form, but for the shadows their branches create across paths and other surfaces. Light isn’t just illuminating the Garden; it becomes part of the composition itself. As the sun moves, relationships between the plants, stones, water, and pathways continually change. A place that feels one way in the morning can become an entirely different visual experience a few hours later.
That immediately felt familiar.
Wright understood light as a material. His buildings change dramatically throughout the day, and after years of photographing them, I have learned that you can’t force that relationship.
You have to read the space first.
Where will the light enter? What will it touch? What will it reveal? Where will the shadows move? And, most importantly, when?
Then you wait.
The Garden required exactly the same patience.
Different areas wanted completely different times of day, so I photographed at sunrise, midday, and sunset. I first photographed the Tea House under relatively flat late-morning light, then returned toward the end of the day and watched the entire structure transform as the warm light moved across it.
Wright once described light as “the beautifier of the building.”
Standing in the Garden watching that Tea House begin to glow, I couldn’t help but think about how beautifully the same idea applied there.
Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona
Seeing the Garden Differently
There is another layer to all of this that makes photographing the Japanese Friendship Garden in Phoenix particularly interesting.
A traditional Japanese garden in the middle of the Sonoran Desert shouldn’t necessarily work.
The climate is completely different. Many of the plants are different. Yet the underlying principles remain intact, adapted to this particular place until the Garden feels unmistakably Japanese while also belonging to Arizona.
That may be where Wright and the Garden connect most strongly for me.
Wright wasn’t interested in making buildings that could be picked up and placed anywhere. He wanted them to belong to their site—to grow from the landscape, climate, materials and conditions around them.
The Japanese Friendship Garden has done something similar.
And I find myself looking at all of this from a photographer’s perspective.
For more than fifteen years, Wright’s architecture has taught me how to slow down, study a place and pay attention to how light, movement, nature and design work together.
Now the Garden is teaching me where some of those lessons began.
I came to these ideas through Wright first. Photographing the Japanese Friendship Garden allowed me to turn the lens around and see them from another direction.
And maybe that’s the part I enjoy most about photography.
No matter how familiar you think you are with a subject, if you stay curious enough and spend enough time really looking, there is always another layer waiting to be revealed.
So go see it for yourself. Walk the paths slowly. Pay attention to what is hidden and what is revealed, how the stones move you, where the shadows fall, and how the Garden changes with the light. You may find yourself seeing more than you expected.
Andrew Pielage
Andrew Pielage is a Phoenix-based architectural and travel photographer whose work has been published both locally and internationally. He is the creator of the #500fllwproject, a long-term visual archive documenting Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural legacy, owner of Brill Gallery & Studio, and an architectural photography instructor who teaches workshops around the country.
www.apizm.com | Instagram: @apielage | Facebook: Andrew Pielage Photography | Brill Gallery & Studio: @brillgalleryandstudio
All photos by Andrew Pielage unless otherwise noted.
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