Photographer Todd Eberle spoke to Modern
Painters executive editor Daniel Kunitz about his new book
"Empire of Space," which pairs images from throughout his career. Here
is the story behind the artwork, in the artist’s own words.

To
hear Eberle discuss other photographic pairings from his book, click
the slide show at left.

I've made many attempts at producing a book that had a focused subject,
but was always dissatisfied, as I wanted my first book to include the
variety of subjects I photograph. It was actually Walker Evans's
great posthumous book "First and Last," which inspired the solution to
my dilemma. On every spread are two images that relate in some
significant way. The book is a gyroscope of Evans's history and memory,
of the personal and not personal. There are so many simple relationships
happening in there: Some of them are formal, some are abstract, some
are conceptual. I thought, What if I looked at my archive that way? It
took me about three days to realize that it was worth doing. It took me
eight months to put together about like 400 pairs.

The picture on the left here, "Grandma Swanson's Sofa, Carpet, and
Painting, Waite Hill, Ohio, June 1991," is one of the most personal in
the book, and has almost the biggest historical arc. My grandmother is
the major aesthetic influence in my life. When I was four years old she
made that sofa cover out of this beautiful linen Schumacher fabric. It
was something so exotic to me; it used to be my favorite thing to go to
her house to see. It triggered my obsession with the grid. She also made
the wall-to-wall carpet by hand. And the painting hanging above the
sofa too. Friends would bring her old wool coats, which she would cut up
and braid. I've never seen anything like it. She was like a Martha
Stewart of her time. She made every piece of clothing that she
owned, had 15 sewing machines.

About 25 years ago, my grandmother made this book called "Herb Garden
Design." It’s still in print. When later I got an assignment to
photograph Martha Stewart for her then-new magazine Living, I called my
mother and said, "I know this woman Martha Stewart is kind of known in
Middle America, but for what?" My mother goes, "Oh, she's really famous.
And she wrote about your grandmother's book in her book on gardening."
You open up the herb garden chapter and it says something like, "The
best book I've ever seen on herb gardens is by Faith Swanson, and
if I ever wrote a book on herb gardens, it would be this one." So, when
I met Martha for the first time it was to make her portrait for the
cover of her magazine. I told her Faith Swanson was my grandmother and
she got very excited and said, "Oh my god, I have to meet her." About a
month later we went to Cleveland together so she could meet her.

With the image on the right, "Ceiling, Unity Temple (1909), Frank Lloyd
Wright, Oak Park, Illinois, October 2003," there's an eerie echo of the
ochre and the autumnal colors on the sofa. But there's an even stranger
connection. When I was a kid, the first thing I wanted to be was an
architect. I remember being in the library of the school where I grew
up, in central Florida, the middle of nowhere, and I saw a book on
architecture. And I have a distinct memory of seeing a picture of
Fallingwater and realizing that I couldn't do that. When I was 16, I
came to visit my grandmother in Cleveland, and I said, "Can we go to
Fallingwater?" which is like three hours away. We went together. She had
a pentax camera, and I asked her if I could take pictures with it. One
of the pictures I took that day is in this book.

I went to Unity temple with [New York Times architecture critic] Nicolai
Ouroussoff. I was obsessed with photographing ceiling grids at the
time. When I saw this ceiling, I said, "Didn't Mondrian come
after this?" And he said, "Yes, well after. Don't you know about the
Wasmuth portfolio?" He explained that a German guy named Wasmuth came to
Chicago, met Frank Lloyd Wright in 1904 or 05. He became so
interested in what Wright was doing he published a portfolio of Wright's
work that was distributed in Europe. Mondrian saw the portfolio and
abandoned the landscape for the grid. 

View Slideshow: Doubled Exposures: Photographer Todd Eberle on His Lavish New Book "Empire of Space"