PHOTOGRAPHER BEHIND THE EICHLERS
For 14 years, Ernie Braun captured Eichler Homes'
modernist utopia with his camera bigger than life
From the pages of the Eichler Network Newsletter
By Suzan Lindstrom
Whenever one thinks of the Eichlers, images of Ernie Braun's vintage
photographs naturally come to mind. The two are entwined -- like Ansel Adams
and the Yosemite valley he immortalized on film.
During Braun's 14 years as a photographer for Eichler Homes, Inc., his
photographic canvas typified not only the homes' architectural features of
expansive walls of glass and their sharp, clean lines of post-and-beam
ceilings; but it also portrayed the lifestyles of the homes' inhabitants.
Images of families doing practical everyday activities -- like cooking in the
kitchen or even frolicking in the backyard over a game of badminton.
But who is Ernie Braun? How did he bring his images to life? And how did he
achieve such astounding results during those one-and-a-half decades of Eichler
photo sessions?
The son of Maurice Braun, one of California's greatest Impressionist
painters, Ernie, 80, is still very much in love with shooting and
teaching photography. The key to photography, he says, is capturing "what you
want to say" about a subject. "Then if you are versatile, and know how to use
the equipment, it's just like a message that you write -- it emits kind of a
graphic image," he told us recently from his San Anselmo home and studio,
perched high on a hillside overlooking a lush Marin valley.
"In the non-human world, everything is designed from a practical point of view
-- the leaves on a plant, the fruit," Braun explained. "And that relates to the
Eichler homes in the sense that their whole design was functional and
artistic," having that same kind of well-designed symmetry.
"When I was doing a photo shoot for Joe Eichler," Braun remembered, a dreamy
look on his face as if traveling back in time, "I'd visit the house we'd be
shooting, before I would actually photograph it, to get an idea of the best
time of day for certain shots, the models that would be needed, and the props."
Eichler Homes sales staff, like Catherine Munson and Bud Sthymmel, oftentimes
pitched in -- doubling as models when professionals weren't available, or in
acquiring items for sets like orange slices, plates, and cups. "I'd help out
any way I could," offered Munson, who today owns Lucas Valley Properties, a
real estate company in Novato. "I was always interested in photography as a
hobby myself, and I loved watching Ernie work. I knew the results he was
getting and was in awe of him."
This utterly charming, delightful, and soft-spoken person, as Munson described
Braun, would slowly walk around the room and ponder his shots, carefully
studying the light and perhaps repositioning the model set that had been
beautifully arranged by interior designer Matt Kahn and his assistants. "Sure,
any Eichler home is photographic enough. But Ernie just had a sense of it,"
stated Munson. "He captured the essence of what he was trying to do; whereas a
lot of other people literally, flat-footedly took a picture." However, Braun,
she said, wasn't just any old photographer. "He's one swell, introspective, and
bright photographer who figured out where the real shot was, and not the
apparent shot."
The best shot for Eichler Homes, according to Braun, was achieved by putting
people into his layouts, which were then used to embellish brochures,
newspapers, magazines, and advertisements. People gave the photos scale and
stirred the interest of buyers, who, he claimed, could relate much better to
kids playing with an electric train on the floor than to a cold, blank room.
However, other clients had a different philosophy. "At the time, I was doing a
lot of architectural photography of buildings like sewage plants, or for
architects and magazines that didn't want people cluttering up their pictures,"
recalled Braun, who only met Joe Eichler on a few occasions. "So I loved the
artistic freedom the Eichler staff and their public relations firms would give
me with assignments -- to put people in the scenes, and, if I wanted to, have
fun staging a pillow fight in a bedroom."
As for the shots themselves, Braun liked the use of implied movement. This
predisposition to show progressions in his shots evolved from his work during
World War II, when he was a U.S. Army combat photographer in Europe. "I'd put
two photos together -- because you can't photograph bullets flying," he
explained. So, he'd take, say, one shot of soldiers running, and the other of
their hitting the ground. Another element that was perhaps born in combat was
Braun's bias towards using natural lighting as much as possible. "I learned
that you couldn't use flash photography over there," commented Braun, recalling
the battlefield. "In fact, the first time I tried using a flash bulb at dusk --
bam, within seconds, mortar shells came racing in."
By the time Braun started photographing for Eichler Homes in 1954, at the age of 33, he had already honed his craft -- first, shooting publicity photos while a student working his way through college at San Diego State; then, in the prewar years, running a photo lab for the Navy involved in the development of sonar and radar; and lastly, as a partner in a photographic studio in Manhattan, New York.
Just as his involvement in photography had become second nature to Braun by the time he found Eichler Homes, his Eichler work routinely would take advantage of lighting changes at different times of the day. If he wanted to emphasize home entertaining, for instance, Braun would stage a cocktail party in the dramatic glow of the evening. But in the daytime, there was a whole other gamut of options. "See how the light is not directly on the people, but reflected," Braun said, pointing to a glossy print of an impressive outdoor lounge scene staged in an Eichler patio. "If you wanted the light streaming in like this, you'd take the photo either fairly early or late in the day -- depending on how the house was oriented -- because the sun is really harsh when it's shining directly on people.
Sometimes overcast days worked well too, Braun indicated, because they presented less contrast. Since film and paper are unable to record bright contrasts, the haze overhead oftentimes allowed many objects and textures -- like the extending structural beams of the house, or the checkered pattern of the picnic blanket -- to become better defined.
"Architectural photography is a balancing act," stated Braun, "because the indoor light is so much less than the outdoor light." So, for the interiors of Eichler homes, Braun would bring the shots to life by mixing in the flash of old-fashioned blue bulbs to emphasize particular aspects of the room. However, he would orient the bulbs, which were on stands pointed away from the scene, aimed at a background wall to give an indirect 'bounce' of light. "You can see reflection of light on the coffee pot or in the glasses of this kitchen scene," stated Braun, "because I taped pieces of white sheeting to the wall to reflect the light, so you weren't aware of it."
As for the arrangements of the Knoll and Herman Miller furniture that were carefully placed around model homes, Braun's secret oftentimes was to reposition them to fit the focal length of his lens. "It's very important the way the lines work," he explained, so if Braun found an angle he liked with the camera, he would manipulate everything else to fill the frame. "Ernie had a compositional need that was in front of him in that ground-glass plate in his camera's viewfinder," added Matt Kahn, Eichler Homes' principle designer, who was moved in more ways than one by Ernie's work. Kahn admits to occasionally having made noise over Braun's redesigns, "but I don't want to over-emphasize that," he stated. He pointed out that Braun was trying to make a statement in his photographs that was reflective of the spirit of the room, and not the room itself, and this naturally called for reorienting furniture and other objects.
Joe and son Ned Eichler sought out people who were the best of their trade, according to Kahn, since 1949 a professor of art at Stanford University. "The Eichlers reached consistently for great things, sometimes to a fault," he said, recalling that the two company heads or their staff would naturally have gone to Mecca for everything, if they could. "And Ernie Braun," according to Kahn, "was an architectural photographer who was Mecca."
Braun eventually became disillusioned with photographing the "design garbage," as he called it, coming from the commercial arena and many other regional residential builders. Eventually, the usually mild-mannered Braun firmly told the clients knocking at his door, "I'll look at your building, and if I'm in sympathy with it, I'll photograph it." This struggle with his own artistic values eventually led Braun to lay aside the financial constraints of supporting a family of seven and make a transition into a new world of nature photography.
Since the early 1970s, Braun has used his macro lens to delve into the micro-world of raindrops and flower petals, and capture with the telephoto lens the tranquil beauty of the world's forests and oceans. He also has led students on photographic expeditions into Peru, New Zealand, Kenya, China, Alaska, and the American west. And out of these explorations into nature have emerged six books: "Living Water," "Tideline," "Exploring Pacific Coast Tidepools," "Grand Canyon of the Living Colorado," "Our San Francisco," and "Portrait of San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area."
But today, after winning many awards and exhibiting his work in museums around the United States, Braun has almost come full-circle, bringing his outdoor world into public buildings and hospitals by marketing prints of his work to art consultants and others. And on weekends, as he has done for the past 20 years, Braun teaches -- guiding photography students along the coastal white sandy beaches and rocky cliffs of the Marin headlands through the Point Reyes Field Seminar Program.
Ever since his uncle placed a folding Kodak camera in his hands at age 12, Braun has strived to enlighten the world around him through his photographs. We at the Eichler Network sincerely thank Ernie Braun for his enduring photographs of Eichler homes, and stand in agreement behind a simple comment made recently by one of his students: "Clone him!"
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