Three Hearts in Shadow — A Sepia Fine Art Photograph from Hollyhock House

Three Hearts in Shadow — Hollyhock House, Los Angeles. © John Corney

Some photographs surprise you by turning out to be about something quite different from what you thought you were photographing. This is one of those.

The Afternoon at Hollyhock House

I was visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House in East Hollywood on a bright, still afternoon in 2017, camera in hand, doing what most visitors do — trying to capture the extraordinary modernist geometry of the building itself. Hollyhock House was Wright's first Los Angeles commission, built between 1919 and 1921 for the oil heiress and arts patron Aline Barnsdall on Olive Hill, the site now known as Barnsdall Art Park. It's a genuinely important building — the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in Los Angeles, inscribed in 2019 as part of "The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright" — and it has that instantly recognisable Wright sensibility: clean rectilinear frames of concrete, sharp shafts of light, a rigorous marriage of building and Southern Californian sky.

What I hadn't planned to photograph was three small wrought-iron chairs.

They were arranged in one of the terraces off the courtyard — three delicate, ornate, ice-cream-parlour-style chairs with heart-shaped backs, sitting empty in a shaft of hard afternoon sun. They weren't Wright's design at all. They looked like they might have wandered in from a different decade, or a different building entirely — chairs that would have suited a Victorian tea garden more naturally than a modernist masterpiece. But there they were, and the sun was doing something remarkable with them.

The Shadows Were the Real Subject

Because those hearts on the chair backs, in that hard sunlight, were throwing beautifully articulated heart-shaped shadows along the ground. Three round seat shadows sitting in a row, and behind each seat shadow, an elegant traced silhouette of the whole chair — the twisted iron legs, the ornate scrollwork, and at the top of each shadow, an unmistakable heart. It was as if the chairs had drawn themselves a second time on the floor, in a more delicate hand, and had left the drawings there for anyone to notice.

Here's the original photograph I took, looking through Wright's stark concrete frame into that sunlit terrace:

The original photograph — three heart-back chairs framed by Wright's architecture at Hollyhock House.

It's a decent architectural photograph. The Wright framing does what Wright framings do — it turns the world outside into a composed image, with the modernist geometry acting as a proscenium arch around a small stage. And the chairs and their shadows are there, doing their quiet work, in the middle of it all.

But something about the piece kept nagging at me long after I got home.

A Sense of Something Wistful

The chairs were empty. Three chairs, three heart-backs, three shadows — and no one sitting on them. Whatever conversations or romances or afternoons they had once held, or might have held, or might still hold in some other afternoon, weren't happening now. The scene was quietly waiting.

I couldn't quite put the feeling into a word. It wasn't sadness exactly — the light was too golden, the shadows too beautiful, the whole tableau too composed. It wasn't nostalgia either — I had no personal history with those chairs; I'd never sat in them, never known anyone who had. What I was feeling was closer to a kind of soft, sweet longing for something that hadn't happened. The Portuguese have a word for this, saudade. The Germans have Sehnsucht. In English we make do with "wistfulness," which is a fine word but doesn't quite reach it. The feeling of being tenderly moved by something that hasn't occurred.

The Sepia Treatment

When I sat down to work with the image, I decided the piece wanted to be lifted out of the architectural context altogether. Wright's frame is beautiful, but it anchors the photograph to a specific place and a specific afternoon in 2017. What I actually wanted was for the piece to feel more untethered from time — closer to a memory than to a record.

So I cropped in tight on the chairs and their shadows, and I converted the image to warm sepia. Sepia, historically, is what photographs become as they age — the silver in old prints slowly oxidises to warm brown tones, and generations of viewers have come to read that colour as "past." A sepia photograph looks like memory itself, even when it's newly made. That was the register I wanted the piece to hold.

The final piece has the mood I was originally reaching for — three empty chairs in a shaft of quiet warm light, three heart-shadows waiting on the floor, and no way to tell what year it is, or whose afternoon this was, or whether the lovers are just arriving or just left.

Bring the Wistfulness Home

Three Hearts in Shadow is available at my Redbubble shop as fine art prints, framed prints, canvas prints, posters, notebooks, and greeting cards. It's not a piece for every room — sepia work reads best in quiet, thoughtful spaces where its contemplative mood has room to breathe. But in the right room — a study, a bedroom, a hallway with soft warm lighting, a reading corner — it holds its own quiet weather.

It also makes an unusually thoughtful card. There isn't an obvious category on a shop rack for a wistful sepia photograph, which is part of why sending one feels considered rather than routine.

Three Hearts in Shadow on Redbubble

You can find all my work at my Redbubble shop, KornKob Art — or search Redbubble for kornkobart (one word).