Infinite Descent
Oriel Staircase, The Rookery, Chicago, IL
Last spring I traveled to Chicago for a destination workshop led by Sharon Tenenbaum, one of the photographers I most admire and whose mentorship has fundamentally reshaped how I see. One of our stops was the historic Rookery Building, whose light court interior was redesigned by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905. But it was the spiral staircase — designed by the building’s original architect, John Wellborn Root, winding down ten floors through the light well — that stopped me cold.
I knew immediately that many photographers had stood exactly where I was standing — and that knowledge made me both more deliberate and quietly anxious. I wanted to find the feeling within it, not just document the geometry.To get the angle I had in mind, I leaned out over the railing until my toes were barely touching the floor. What I hadn’t fully accounted for was the fear. Somewhere along the way — shooting industrial rooftops with nothing to hold onto — I’d developed a real unease with unguarded heights. And this was exactly that. Looking straight down ten floors of open air, I felt it fully. My hands trembled. My body knew what was below me and wasn’t interested in my artistic intentions.
I kept shooting anyway. Tripods weren’t permitted and the interior light was dim, so I pushed the ISO and kept going. Each time someone climbed the stairs I had to stop, reset, and begin again — small shifts of angle, fractions of a degree — searching for the frame that would capture not just the geometry of the spiral but its rhythm, its sense of turning endlessly into itself.
Later, during one of Sharon’s follow-up sessions, we worked on the image together in Photoshop. She helped me shape the light so it gradually brightened as the eye traveled deeper into the spiral, and evened out the atrium windows so the light made visual sense. That conversation about light and intention was as illuminating as the moment of making the photograph.
I titled the image Infinite Descent — because that’s what it felt like standing there. That breathless plunge through spiral after spiral, arch after arch, into something without bottom. But I kept feeling it described something else too. I was afraid of letting go of that railing and equally afraid of not getting the shot — or worse, getting the same image a hundred other photographers already had. Trembling ten floors up, the fears were real but so was the opportunity. I was committed. Determined. And I leaned in for the shot.
When I finally stepped back from that railing and saw what I had on my screen, I immediately felt it — that quiet rush of satisfaction. Not certainty, but something close — that I’d found my version of that staircase.
