05.16.24
Fairview Heights Public Library

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Richard Sprengeler is a fine art photographer, who produced a body of work at Cementland in 2022.

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Daniil:

When did you start living in St. Louis?

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Richard Sprengeler: 

My family moved to Fairview Heights in 1968. So I've been a resident of Fairview Heights since the age of eight or ten. I left for the military; I was in a Navy jazz band for four years. And I was in college for four years. And I lived in St. Louis several times in different apartments. But ten  years ago, my parents passed away, and I inherited the house. And so I'm back in the house I grew up in. So I've mostly been not in St. Louis, but in Fairview Heights. But when people ask me where I'm from, I say St. Louis.

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Daniil:  

When did you first learn about Cementland?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

I learned about it in the spring of '22. I was photographing inside the Laclede Power building on Laclede's Landing, which is an abandoned space. I love abandoned spaces. I found a way to sneak in there. There was a doorway that was chained closed, but if you really pushed on it, you could just squeeze in. If I was 30 pounds heavier, I wouldn't be able to get in there. 

So I’m all alone in this building, and all of a sudden, somebody says hello to me from behind. That scared me. First I thought it was the police or the owners. I turned around, and it was a young man with a drone. His hobby was flying his drone around the interior of abandoned spaces. And he said, "Have you been to Cementland?" And I said, "No. I'm aware of it. I know Bob Cassilly was building it up north. But no, I've never been there." And he says, "You've got to go there." And he proceeded to show me pictures taken by his drone in all these buildings, and an aerial shot that showed the whole property. And he even showed me where I could sneak into the property. 

So the next day, I was up there, and that was the start of it. My whole life has been filled with synchronicities, just things happening at the right time. And I told some photographer friends of mine that I was starting to photograph Cementland, and my friend sent me an article from the St. Louis Business Journal saying that Cementland had just been sold to a trucking company, and that the new owners would take possession in one month. Okay, that means I've got a month to shoot this. And when I do long term projects, I don't believe in going in with a handheld camera and taking 400 photographs in an afternoon and saying, "That's it. I'm done." I spend time with the subject matter. Typically I'll find a subject, and I'll spend a couple of years doing it. And in this case, I had a month. 

So I was there multiple times every week for a month, just to get as many photographs as I could out of the space before it was closed off. As it turned out, the first week or two that the new owners had possession, they didn't do anything. So I was still able to go in. And then, after about two weeks, the open space where you could literally drive into the property was blocked off. So you couldn't get into the property, but I'm fairly thin, and I was able to squeeze through a spot. So I continued to photograph. And then they closed it off a little bit more, and I found there was a whole other fence that I could squeeze through. And so for another four weeks, I was able to photograph the site. 

After four weeks and the month and a half before that, I felt that I was pretty much done with the project. And you can tell that by the fact that you're not coming up with really good photographs anymore, or you're starting to repeat the same things you've done in the past, or it doesn't excite you anymore. That usually happens with a project. And what I generally do is take a break. I take a break for a week or a month, and then I come back to it. And you have a different mindset. You're literally a different kind of a photographer, and I'll be able to find new stuff that's different than what I had done in the past. And sometimes that doesn't happen, and then it really is done. So I felt that I was pretty much done, and that I wasn't coming up with anything new. And that was the day that I slipped and fell, breaking four ribs on a piece of concrete. 

I knew that this was the last day. The project really is over now; I broke four ribs, and it takes six weeks to get over broken ribs. So I continued to photograph for another three or four hours, and then I went home, and that was the end of the project. I spent about two and a half months there.

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Daniil: 

After you broke your ribs, you continued to photograph for three or four hours?

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Richard Sprengeler:   

Yeah. Because I knew that was the end of it. The last time I ever got to be there.

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Daniil: 

I'd love to hear more about how you structured your shooting process. 

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Richard Sprengeler: 

The first time I went in, I didn't go in with my "serious" camera, my four by five inch view camera. I also have an eight by ten inch view camera, but it's a lot heavier, and I generally don't hike around with that. My other serious camera is a 35 millimeter camera, a digital camera on a tripod. But I just went in with my point-and-shoot and my iPhone. I spent a day and an afternoon photographing, just going into all the spaces and seeing what's there and taking snapshots with the iPhone. And then coming back knowing the area, as opposed to going in there with my serious cameras and not knowing what I was looking for. The next time I came back, I knew where to go. I knew what was interesting. So that's my methodology: I scout an area first, and then I come in and start doing the serious work.

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Daniil:  

Can you walk me through one of those visits? So you would get there and park somewhere first, and then?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

It's been an urban explorer destination for young people for 12 years. And probably even when Cassilly had it, people were going in there. And when it was my second or third visit, there was a young couple in their late teens that I talked to. I had been parking my car right on Scranton, and I made up a fake sign that said "Environmental Remediation." And I stuck it on my door. They said, "Oh, park on the other side of Riverview in that little park. We just park over there and walk across Riverview.” So that's where I parked my car, and I didn't have to worry about the owners coming and seeing my car there, and going in and looking for me. 

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Daniil:  

So you did that, and then you would go in? And would you cover the entire ground of Cementland every visit?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

No, no. What I would do is focus on one area. I'd pick one, like that main processing building. I got 80 great photographs out of it, but that was over a period of ten weeks. I generally stay in one area and just explore that area for the time that I'm there that day. What happens with me when I photograph spaces like this, is exhaustion sets in after about four hours. And it's not necessarily physical exhaustion. When I'm photographing, I'm intensely concentrating. And after four hours, you just get tired mentally, and you start to lose enthusiasm. So four hours is about my limit when I'm out shooting like that, because of the intense concentration. 

So I'd spend four hours in one area. And if I knew there was more there, the next day I'd come back and continue in that area until I had covered it. And then I'd move on to another spot. And there were plenty of spots; I believe it's 54 acres. After I had been to every location, it was like I was saying before, where a project is done, and you're not getting anything new. I would take a break and come back. So after 5–6–7–8 days of photographing other sites, I would come back to that site that I had done first. And I'd start finding stuff I couldn't find the first time. That happened the entire time: I'd come back to sites that I'd already photographed, and since a week or two would go by, I would find new photographs that I didn't see before.

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Daniil: 

In the weeks that you were working there, did you observe changes happening to the landscape?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

Well, for the first month and two weeks, the new ownership hadn't gone into the site and started altering it. Then, all of a sudden, they came in one day I was there. And it was completely overgrown—trees, shrubs everywhere. And then I came in, and I saw that they had started to bulldoze down all the trees. That's when I saw that huge mound, the largest mound in North America, because they'd gone in and bulldozed down the trees that had completely covered that whole area. 

The clearing of the trees and the brush opened up a lot of spaces that I was unaware of. I wasn't aware of how extensive that lagoon was until they started dumping dirt down. Initially, they took their bulldozers and trucks up to the top of the mound and started filling dump trucks up with dirt, driving down the mound and dumping it into the lagoon. So the lagoon was starting to fill up. They started around the smokestack. There was dirt piling up around the smokestack, about four to eight feet deep and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So that was the first thing, taking dirt down from the mound.

That's pretty much the extent of the change for the weeks I was there. I think they were focusing all of their energy on getting that dirt down before they could do anything else. You're gonna have 15 feet of loose dirt covering that 54 acres. And if they tried to build anything on that, that's gonna settle. If they put an asphalt parking lot for all the trucks there, I don't know how long that asphalt parking lot is going to last. I have not been back since I broke my ribs that day, two years ago. The castle complex area was half buried. So they didn't even tear those buildings down. Like the building with the gothic windows and then the other building that was next to the pool—they didn't even tear those down. They just started to cover it up with dirt.

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Daniil: 

And alongside with your shooting, you did a lot of research into Cementland?

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Richard Sprengeler: 

To tell you the truth, I did not contact people about it until after my shooting was done. Someone mentioned Bill Christman, so I went and had a long talk with Bill. And he gave me Kurt Knickmeyer's number. And we had two long lunch hours, probably about a total of six hours of conversation, where he was just a goldmine of information. And those two people were my sources. I also went online and got some information about the Portland Cement Plant. And there are photographs online by other photographers who went in there and took pictures of it while Cassilly was alive, and where you can see the areas with all the bridges going out to the island. Jennifer Silverberg worked for the Riverfront Times, and she went out and photographed that. There was an article about it in the Riverfront Times, I don't know what year.

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Daniil:  

So why did you decide to do this research after shooting?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

I was going to do a presentation at the High Low. And so I knew I needed to do my research. I couldn't just show pictures; I needed to talk about it, and I needed to know what I was talking about. 

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Daniil: 

Do you feel that the collection tells a story about Cementland? Or do you look at it more as work that stands on its own, independently of Cementland's story?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

I think both. I think my photographs of Cementland and other projects I did before that have a dual purpose. One is documentation. And the primary purpose is fine art photography. That's my background, fine art photography. But I also specialize in photographing spaces that are no longer going to be existent. You know, Cementland is gone. Other places are gone. 

My first major project was photographing the aftermath of the flood in 1993. And all that's gone. Within five years of the flood, all of the condemned buildings and houses were gone. So it's a fine art project, and it's also a documentation of what the flood did to these communities. So there's a dual purpose to it, which I think makes the body of work a lot stronger. And I hope the photographs of Cementland will convey what Bill Christman said: that if Cassilly had lived, it would have been one of the wonders of the world. Even in its stripped and overgrown state, I hope that sense of how spectacular and unique it was comes out.

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Daniil: 

You have such a range of subjects in your work. You've done landscape photography, travel photography, architectural photography. Where do you think the Cementland series fits into your larger practice? Do you think it feeds back into any of those ongoing subject areas in your photography?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

Yeah. It fits in with documenting the St. Louis region in general. The first body of work I ever did was the Flood of ‘93, which is the St. Louis region. And then after that, I was commissioned to photograph the Cupples Station warehouses before their renovation into office spaces and lofts. I did that for two years. And that's something that actually didn't disappear, but it was renovated. Then after that, I did a body of work on the Sainte Genevieve junkyard, of 250 antique cars that were rusting. And that's gone. And, of course, Cementland. 

Right now, I'm just finishing up a project on Chouteau's Landing. I started photographing that a couple of years ago. Actually, I've been wandering into Chouteau's Landing for 40 years, certainly after I got out of school for photography in 1982. I've gone back off and on for 40 years. And then, a friend of mine, the same friend who told me Cementland was sold, sent me an article saying that Chouteau's Landing is going to be renovated into an office complex. And that's a really unique abandoned warehouse district that's been a mecca for photographers for, gosh, 40–50 years. And it’s going to be transformed into something gentrified, newer looking. And the quaintness, the urban decay feel to it is going to be gone. So that's another project that's not going to be destroyed, but it's going to be drastically altered. This is another case, just like these other bodies of work, where I can do a fine art body of work with fine art photographs, but also document something that's either changing or disappearing. 

The original influence for that whole concept goes back to the French photographers in the 1800s and early 1900s. In particular, Charles Marville was commissioned by the French government in the 1850s to photograph old Paris before it was torn down and renovated. And his work was highly influential on me for just the concept of documenting disappearing spaces. And photographing architecture in general. And then in the early 1900s, Eugène Atget also photographed Paris before a lot of the renovation. So they were behind the idea of photographing things before they disappear.

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Daniil: 

You also photograph modernist architecture that’s still active, like some of those parking garages you shoot. Did you start doing that before you got into documenting the abandoned side of St. Louis architecture?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

I did Cupple Station before that. And then I did the parking garages. So yes, that was before a lot of this other documentation of abandoned spaces began. I just got into a parking garage. The famous Barr Parking Garage has been condemned, and I heard that the famous Barr Building is condemned too. I found a way to get into the parking garage, and I've been photographing inside that parking garage. The parking garage series is 25 years old. I'm coming back to it and finding out that here's this parking garage that's going to be torn down, so it's another endangered space.

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Daniil: 

What's the relationship between the side of your work that's focused on urban decay, and the side of your work that's focused on newer St. Louis architecture?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

What's the relationship between the two? Well, what's interesting is that the modern city that I've been photographing is going to be urban decay in 40 or 50 years. Everything goes through change.

But basically, what I'm attracted to is form. My background, originally, before I was a photographer, is being a jazz musician. I'm a jazz trombonist. And there's a long list of photographers, great photographers, who were musicians first. Including Ansel Adams, who was a concert pianist. 

I come from a musical family. My father played trumpet. My mother was a painter and a ceramicist. For his vocation, my father was a mathematician. He taught mathematics at Belleville Area College, the Southwestern Illinois College. And I didn't get that much of my father's side to me as far as mathematics, but I did appreciate geometry. I didn't like any of the math classes I took in high school or college, but geometry somehow stuck. And I think it's because it's visual. So I'm attracted to visual forms, geometric forms. Be it old, dilapidated disappearing places, or the Arch in modern St. Louis. It's all a form that I'm interested in.

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Daniil: 

I'm really curious—when you're photographing rubble, decaying buildings falling apart, with all those iron bars and wooden planks sticking out, do you look at it with the same eye as when you're composing those clean, already geometrically structured buildings? And you're bringing sort of an order to those dilapidated buildings through your composition? Or do you think when you're composing with decay as the subject matter, you are breaking out of that perfect modernist form?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

No, I think I approach it in the same manner. I'm attracted to form. I'm attracted to geometry and the relationship between forms to each other. When I was in eighth grade, I remember studying Brazil and Brasília. Brasília was built from scratch. There was a complete architectural plan for the entire city, and it was built. American cities aren't built that way. It's eclectic: there's just a hodgepodge of all sorts of stuff stuck right next to each other. And it's that collection of forms and how they relate to each other that interests me. And so be it modern architecture or dilapidated buildings that are falling down, I approach it with the same toolset. I would say I've got a toolset of compositional ideas and practice that I apply no matter if it's new or old.

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Daniil: 

Do you feel like it's kind of an ordering process? Because a lot of those scenes at Cementland are extremely chaotic when you look at them with the naked eye. There is, obviously, the skeleton of the factory that's very meticulously planned and ordered, but a lot of it is just chaos and entropy at this point. But your photographs appear very geometric, very systematic. So when you're coming into a liminal space like that, is it an act of ordering through your photographic lens?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

Yes. Basically, I look at how to simplify chaos, making order out of chaos. And a lot of that is not shooting too wide, not getting the whole space in. I'll narrow my focus, my frame of my photograph, to exclude whatever is not appropriate and whatever is jumbled and chaotic. And try to simplify the composition into basic large shapes that are interesting. That's how I approach it.

Edward Weston is a great modernist photographer. One of his quotes is, "Composition out of chaos." And that's basically what I do, composition out of chaos.

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Daniil: 

Do you think there is a particular aesthetic to Cementland that exists outside of your photographs, maybe comprised of the Missouri Portland Cement factory architecture, plus Bob Cassilly's intervention, plus whatever entropy has done over the years? Do you think that forms a specific aesthetic already that you're interpreting through your work? Or do you approach it the same way as you would any subject matter?

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Richard Sprengeler:   

It was a little different. Even though in the 12 years since Bob Cassilly’s death Cementland has been stripped, I was trying to show evidence of what he had done in the photographs. Some people mentioned, "You know, I really don't see what Cassilly did in these photographs, because so much of it is gone." But if you really look, you can tell he did this. Like those holes that he busted through the walls, and other things. I was trying to illuminate his mind. What was going on in his head when he sat there and went, "Oh, I think I'll put a forest of trees down there." You got this huge space—what are you going to do with this space? And that's what came into Bob Cassilly's mind. Unfortunately, he never got to that point. 

There were two big cottonwood trees he hauled in from the cemeteries in St. Louis. He cut them all off flat, about 25 feet above where the bridges were, where the church window building was. He put an observation platform on top, and he put a spiral staircase up to the observation platform on top of the trees. And you can still see the platforms in one of the photographs, just kind of lying there. And Kurt Knickmeyer said, "Yeah, it was a great idea. But he forgot the fact that when he got the trees, they were already dead." And after five years, the trees were falling apart.

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Daniil: 

Do you see any connections between your travel photography and the way that you approach photographing and exploring abandoned locations in St. Louis?

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Richard Sprengeler:   

It's a completely different mindset. When I do travel photography, I don't bring my view cameras. Travel photography is kind of like the classic street photography, where it's a very fluid technique of getting photographs. You don't set up a tripod; you don't have a view camera. I don't even use a tripod with my 35 millimeter camera. Everything is handheld. It's very fluid. Sometimes I don't even look through the camera. If I'm walking around in the midst of a bunch of people, I'll just snap a bunch of pictures. 

And some of the great street photographers, like Gary Winogrand, got really good at not looking through the camera and getting good compositions. It used to be called "shooting from the hip," where photographers would have the camera on a strap. The camera would be right here, and they could just walk around and shoot from the hip. And I got really good at coming close to getting the framing that I want. There's a looseness to those photographs that's completely opposite to my architectural work. It's kind of like a vacation away from that stringent technique and letting it all go and loosening up and letting anything happen. And I enjoy the difference between the two. 

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Daniil: 

When you're approaching your subject matter in St. Louis, is there a sense of discovery of the unfamiliar for you? Or are you defamiliarizing the subject matter that's close to home?

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Richard Sprengeler: 

I'm always looking for something new. That being said, I'm still photographing the arch. 

But I'm constantly looking for new subject matter. With architecture, one of the things that it has in relation to landscape photography is the weather and the sky. So I've been photographing downtown St. Louis for 40 years. And a couple years ago, there were some spectacular thunderstorms. I spent a whole summer doing thunderstorm photographs in St. Louis. And the dynamism of the sky and the storms and the clouds make it a different photograph. I could shoot the same framing of something and have a completely different photograph, because of what's going on in the sky. So an area never gets old. It's always changing. It's always dynamic. 

Sometimes the buildings change, slowly. But there's always a different quality in the air and in the sky with the clouds. My next project after Chouteau's Landing is night photography. I've done some night photography. I've got night photographs on my website. But I want to really dive into that deep, and do that until I think I'm done. And I suspect that will take a couple of years. 

But right now, I'm finishing with Chouteau's Landing. And it's a funny thing that happens when I'm done with a project. I'm not sure if it's a sense of loss, or it's a sense of, "What do I do now?" It's almost like a depression sets in. I'm sitting at home, and I don't have any new negatives to work on. I'm not sure what I'm going to shoot. So I'm looking for what is the next thing to photograph that's different from anything I've ever done before. And I think the night photography is the answer after Chouteau's Landing. I've done 40 years of daylight photography; I could do 40 years of night photography. It's unlimited.

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Daniil: 

When you're out in St. Louis looking for new subject matter from a fine arts photography perspective, do you see any connection to the UrbEx culture there? Like the urban exploration folks who go to the same places, but might not be approaching it from the same vantage point as you. Or do you see what you do as completely distinct from what urban explorers do?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

Well, they're not out trying to make fine art photographs with a big view camera. But they are out exploring, and basically that's what I'm doing. When I'm photographing, I'm exploring. And I like to hang out with those guys and have them introduce me to places I've never seen before. 

There's an article about the famous Barr Building, which has been condemned. A reporter from the St. Louis Post Dispatch got in with some urban explorers. And he talks about going through the building, and he says it was like an apocalyptic scene. Graffiti everywhere, destruction. And then the beauty of the skyline, taking that sunset from the top of the building. 

Jason Gray got permission and was escorted into the sewer system of St. Louis, and came up with some spectacular photographs. I would love to get down into that. And the cave system under St. Louis is supposed to be spectacular, the abandoned tunnels under St. Louis. It's a honeycomb of subterranean space. And I'd like to get into that.

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Daniil: 

Where do you think is the boundary between UrbEx minded photography and fine arts photography? 

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Richard Sprengeler:  

They are basically taking snapshots to show what they found and what they did. And that's fine. And I'm doing something a little bit more thought out, a little bit more serious. Not to denigrate them, but they want to describe what they did that night and what they found. And I want to take that one more step. And interpret a space through the artistic mindset. 

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Daniil: 

Where are you at on the ethics of recreational trespassing? 

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Richard Sprengeler:  

A lot of people ask me that, because a huge percentage of my photographs were taken while trespassing. I have no problem with it, obviously. But that being said, I'm not going into spaces to vandalize them, not going into spaces to steal anything. I'm going in there to glorify them, maybe. So there's nothing nefarious about what I'm attempting to do, except for the fact that I'm there, and I'm not supposed to be. There's an old saying in photography, "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission." 

That goes back to Cementland. I had heard of several other photographers who would ask permission to go into Cementland and photograph. And the answer was no. Emphatically, no. So I didn't even attempt to get permission; I just went. What I generally do is go on weekends, when there's nobody in the space. If it's an abandoned space, it's not really an issue. If it's a space where I shouldn't be, I'll go on a weekend, when places are closed. And I'll go into places where I don't see anybody. Technically, parts of Chouteau's Landing might be trespassing. But that's where the graffiti wall is. Hundreds of people, thousands of people go down there. And again, I'm not trying to do any damage to the property. I'm trying to glorify it and to interpret it and make a piece of art out of it. 

I came up with a theory. I've been stopped occasionally, but in 40 years of doing this, I've never been arrested. I can count on one hand the times I had been approached and asked what I was doing. And I've got this idea, this concept in my head, that within one second of when your eyes meet, you know what they're all about, and they know what you're all about. So just be courteous. Tell them what you're doing, and that you don't mean any harm. And in those times I have been stopped and asked what I was doing, I was courteous, and I told them what I was up to. Some of the times, they said, "Oh, okay, that's fine." And several times I've been told, "Well, you'll have to leave." And that's all that's ever happened to me. So that's my methodology of how to approach people if I'm stopped. Just be courteous to people and tell them what you're up to. 

That being said, I don't want to encourage people to do this. You are taking a risk of being arrested. So I don't want to publicly say, "Yeah, go out and do this. It'll be cool." I go in with the assumption that I might be arrested. And I'm willing to take that risk. So far, it's never happened. 

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Daniil: 

Your entire Cementland series is shot in black and white. How do you decide what you shoot in black and white and what you shoot in color?

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Richard Sprengeler: 

Actually, the digital—the iPhone and the point-and-shoot—were shot in color and converted to black and white. So I do have an option to make color out of a lot of this. If I did, it would be a completely different body of work. It wouldn't fit with this at all.

Black and white is much more difficult than color. Color just takes care of itself. If you're a color photographer, and you're going into the darkroom, you're just basically trying to make the exposure right, make it look like the scene. In black and white, you're not held under the limitation of just making it look like the scene. You can make drastic changes in tonality that if you try in color, the colors would get off and get saturated. But with black and white, you can make drastic changes to your photographs. 

Ansel Adams made this comment about his work. He said, "My work is optically accurate." It's a picture of a mountain, and it looks like a mountain. If it's a picture of a tree, it looks like a tree. But tonally, his photographs are vast departures from reality. And it takes a long time to learn how to do that. Usually, almost any subject matter could be successfully photographed in color. Not that many can be photographed in black and white. A typical example is if you have a building with a big space on it that's all green and right next to it a space that's all red. You take a photograph in color, and you see the red and the green. You take a photograph in black and white, and they look exactly the same. 

You have to learn how to control tones in black and white. In particular, how to control the sky density. In black and white, you can put colored filters in front of the lenses to darken the sky. Ansel Adams was famous for that. His photograph Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico has a black sky, and the sun's out. When you talk about a vast departure from reality, that's the epitome of it. Not all scenes can work in black and white. And you have to develop an eye to recognize that.

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Daniil: 

So when you're photographing Cementland in black and white, that departure from reality afforded by the black and white format allows you to play with formal elements more?

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Richard Sprengeler: 

Yes, you can exaggerate the formal elements by the tonalities that you use, by burning and dodging. Burning and dodging is a dark room technique, where burning means darkening an area, and dodging means lightening an area. So you can accentuate form. If you have important form that's bright, you can make it brighter and the surrounding area darker, and make it jump out of the photograph, and make the photograph more three dimensional. That's one of the techniques you can use in black and white photography. You could do it in color too, but it doesn't work as well.

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Daniil: 

And does that departure from reality also give you a way to introduce more of an affective, emotional quality to the work? Do you actively think about that? 

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Richard Sprengeler:  

The emotional impact of a photograph? I think about that all the time. I generally don't photograph a scene if I don't have an emotional reaction to what's in front of me. If I don't feel anything, I generally won't photograph it.

There's an interesting thing that happened to me. 40 years ago, there was an exhibit in St. Louis at Gallery 210 of master photographs from the collection of private people in St. Louis. There was an Ansel Adams Moonrise Hernandez in it; there was Edward Weston; there was Brett Weston; there was Minor White; there was a whole slew of master photographers. And there was a black and white eight by ten inch contact print by Edward Weston that just floored me. It was a close up shot of a cow vertebrae with an egg sitting on top of it. And it just stopped me in my tracks. I looked at it for a while. I'm getting emotional now just thinking about that photograph. And unbeknownst to me, I noticed there was a tear going down my cheek. There's a spiritual experience that you can get from great pieces of art. And that's what I'm trying to achieve. It's very difficult.

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Daniil: 

Viewers might interpret your work differently, but what do you think are some of the affective qualities of your Cementland photos when you look at them yourself? 

Is it melancholic, is it nostalgic, or is it something about the dystopian, frightening, almost sublime nature of that landscape? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but those are just some things that I see myself.

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Richard Sprengeler:  

It's multilevel. There's certainly a melancholy, knowing what happened to Bob Cassilly. And the melancholy of knowing that this masterpiece is gone, and it will never come back again. So there's melancholy.

I'd like to publish a book on my St. Louis work and Cementland. And that's one of the messages I want to get across: this is something that we almost had; it was within our grasp. And it was taken away from us by this tragic accident. So there's definitely a melancholy to it. There's a sense of transience. The impermanence of manmade materials. It's a whole genre of photography. You've probably heard the term ruin porn. So it's related to that. But it's kind of a silly term.

It's kind of a description of the 20th century industrial era. This is how things were done in the 20th century. 100 years from now, we will look back on this, and we might laugh at the way we were doing things. But it's a documentation of American industry. And Bob Cassilly had interesting comments about American industry. He said, in his opinion, American architecture was basically copying things from Europe. And he says, "But it's our industry that is so uniquely American." And that's what drew him to Cementland. He wanted to champion and show American industry for what it was. It's grand. It's frightening at times, like some of the spaces that I photographed. But he wanted to show that this is the ingenuity of America at its best, in our industry.

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Daniil: 

So that’s a bit of nostalgia there?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

Mhm, nostalgia. Walker Evans was a big influence on me, and he photographed in the Depression. And these are in the same visual category. Decaying America.

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Daniil: 

Unlike Walker Evans, you almost never have people in your photographs. The story is almost always told exclusively through architectural forms. 

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Richard Sprengeler:  

Right. I've thought about that. People have asked me that. And a part of that is the fact that you just don't have a lot of street life in St. Louis. I've been up on top of the parking garages, looking towards downtown with the Arch and the streets, and I wanted people in the photographs. And it was noon. I stood up there for 20 minutes, and there was nobody on the sidewalks in downtown St. Louis. So it's kind of a byproduct of downtown St. Louis. Other cities have a more vibrant downtown. 

I remember going to Washington DC and New York City. And my god, New York City is alive 24 hours a day. You walk out at three o'clock in the morning—there's people everywhere. And St. Louis just isn't that way. There's a mass migration to the suburbs, the white flight. Everybody left the city and it fell under decay. And fortunately, in the last 10 years with tax abatements, there's a lot of renovation of these old buildings going on. It's unfortunate that we don't have a vibrant, peopled downtown, but it's slowly coming back. I've wanted to do street photography for a long time, and I have to go to other cities to do it. With the exception of the Metrolink, which I've got on my website, and baseball games. If you go to the stadium, you can just photograph people. But generally, you can't do street photography in St. Louis.

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Daniil: 

You mentioned ruin porn, which seems to be a derogatory term. And you also mentioned your inspirations among 1800s and 1900s photographers. But are there photographers of abandoned ruined landscapes who are your contemporaries that you feel you're in conversation with?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

Yeah. Right here in St. Louis, Michael Eastman. His work in Cuba is spectacular. I've seen that work for quite a while, and I love that work. And he's a great example of a color architectural photographer. I think his interior spaces are what made him famous. Not only Cuba, but he's gone to Europe and to a lot of places. There's a photographer who photographed Chernobyl. The name is escaping me right now. He also did Cuba. I'm a big fan of his work. 

And they're all large format photographers. Michael Eastman is large format, and this photographer is large format. People asked me why I use the large format. And my answer is, I make better photographs with those big cameras. Because it slows you down. You see a big image. And you can study it. And you can make fine, small decisions, particularly on the edges. The finishing touch to a good composition, particularly with architecture, is the edges. And when you're using a large format camera, you can see that detail. A lot of times when I go out, I'll have my big cameras with me, and I'll have my 35 millimeter. And for some reason, I'll spend an afternoon using the 35 millimeter camera. And when I get the images on the screen, I'll notice I didn't recognize something on the edge. And it's because I'm looking through a hole this big, and you just can't see what's going on. So I use the view cameras, because I make better photographs.

Charles Sheeler is also a good one. He may be more known as a painter, but he was a great photographer. And his work that he did with Ford plants in Detroit was spectacular, back in the 30s. Lewis Hine's work is wonderful. Not only the children, but the spaces themselves. 

I would say my biggest influence architecturally is Joel Meyerowitz. This is before your time, but in 1980, there was a huge show at the St. Louis Art Museum: Ansel Adams and the West and Joel Meyerowitz's St. Louis and the Arch. Meyerowitz was a color photographer. He was commissioned to photograph St. Louis, and he used an eight by ten inch view camera and color film. And when I saw Ansel's half of the show and Joel Meyerowitz's half of the show in St. Louis, that's what made me decide to become a photographer. That show and Meyerowitz's work introduced me to the concept of architecture as a viable subject matter for fine art photography. And Ansel's work introduced me to the extraordinary beauty of the black and white medium, if you master it and know how to use it. Edward Weston and Ansel Adams are my two biggest influences, I think.

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Daniil: 

To me, one thing that's different about your photography, compared to a lot of the architectural fine art photography that deals with post industrial buildings that I've seen, is that you get really up close and personal. There is definitely a sense of where you're positioned in the scene. A lot of the photography that I've seen of these post industrial buildings is framed from a distance, focusing on the overall architectural form. Whereas looking at your photography, there is that almost urban explorer element to it, where you can tell where you're physically situated in this building, and it's cropped in very close a lot of the time.

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Richard Sprengeler: 

I learned from Fred Picker, a famous photographer, the importance of finding the precise camera position for every photograph. And that's a lesson that some photographers never really learn. And that's the most important decision that you make when you compose a photograph. The best example I've got is a shot of the inside of the St. Louis Cathedral Basilica. And it's at the back of the church looking to the front. And there's a chain hanging from the ceiling with a little cross dangling from it, and it's framed by a distant window just perfectly. It's really striking if you find it in the picture. And if you move the camera one inch, it's off. 

The other thing about my approach and the style I've developed is that for the first 10 years of my photography with a view camera, I only had one lens. Not by choice but because of economics, unfortunately. And it was a fairly long lens, so I developed this tight compositional style that permeates my work. And it even permeates my work when I use a wide angle lens. A lot of photographers, like you were just saying, have this bigger scene. I'll use a wide angle lens, but I'll still get in tight. And that's a byproduct of only having a long lens for the first 10 years of my photography career, and it shaped everything I did after that. 

With a wide angle lens, you can get a huge area, but you could also get in close and not get all that stuff. Photography is as much about what's in the scene, as what is just outside of the scene, what you've excluded. And as you narrow in on the composition, you're excluding constantly. Gotta get rid of that, gotta get rid of this. So I tend to come into a space and reduce it to its most significant part and eliminate the clutter.

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Daniil: 

Do you ever think about the socioeconomic context framing the landscapes you are shooting? Is that important to your work at all? 

At the far end of that, I'm thinking of somebody like Camilo José Vergara: very socially minded photographers of urban landscapes who approach it with an almost sociological lens to contextualize their photos of decaying postindustrial buildings in larger narratives about socioeconomic processes in these cities. Like when we were talking earlier about how white flight shapes your photography, for example.

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Richard Sprengeler:  

Are you familiar with Bernd & Hilla Becher from Germany? They were socialists, and their industrial photographs are all about socialism and the strength of the worker to unite.

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Daniil: 

Yeah, it’s interesting that visually their work is the exact opposite of yours. At least the work that I've seen, of them cataloging former industrial buildings.

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Richard Sprengeler:  

And they weren't necessarily former. A lot of those places were still in use.

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Daniil: 

Yeah, that too. But the way that they frame them, they single out that subject isolated from the larger surrounding scene, so it's almost scientific looking. Whereas your photographs of similar structures are the opposite of that, where you're hyper zoomed in on the materiality and the details, to the point where it abstracts the overall structure. 

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Richard Sprengeler:  

And they only photographed on cloudy days. There's never a blue sky in their photographs, and there's never sharp shadows inside all that intricate pipe work of their work. That's the look that they liked. And it works really, really well. 

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Daniil: 

I don't know whether you share their political views, but when you're photographing, do those wider political or socioeconomic concerns enter your work at all? You have some photos of decaying buildings in St. Louis where you will frame the Arch in the background, or the downtown highrises when you photograph the unhoused encampments on the riverfront. Do you take those as individual scenes that tell a story in and of themselves, or do you think of the context in which these photographs come to be?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

I think the context is important. I've ventured into North St. Louis more than a few times and photographed the abandoned houses up there. What a tragedy, you know. African Americans in North City who can't afford to pay their house property taxes have their house taken away from them by the city. And the city doesn't take that property and use it or resell it. They abandon it and let it fall to pieces. So what the hell is the city doing? That's not a constructive way to build a society, where you take property away from people because they can't pay their taxes and then you let the whole place fall to pieces. It's just insane. They take property away from the homeowner because it's not up to code. But when they take it, they don't bring it up to code. They just abandon it. So my photographs I've taken in North St. Louis definitely have a sociological message behind them, about what's going on. 

I wish that I had been around when Pruitt Igoe was still standing. The history of what happened to that was that the federal government basically said, "We will build this for you, if the city maintains it." And the city decided these Black folks up in North St. Louis aren't important. We're gonna spend our money somewhere else. So they didn't maintain the buildings, and they fell apart. They had one plumber for all those buildings. The architect built elevators that only stopped at every other floor. I don't know if he wanted people to get exercise or what. 

One of the most important books I ever read was a book on St. Louis called The Broken Heart of America. Wow, that opened up my eyes to a lot of things.

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Daniil: 

Is there anything I didn't ask you about Cementland or your work that you'd like to share?

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Richard Sprengeler:  

Both with my Cementland work and with my architectural work and photographing the city of St. Louis, I want people to appreciate what they've got here. St. Louis has some of the most beautiful, elegant brick buildings in the country. And we're losing them all the time. And I think it's really important that people appreciate what they have and do something to help preserve it. You hear about buildings coming down all the time. And what replaces them is usually appalling. 

The prime example is the old Checkerdome. Were you here when the Checkerdome came down in 1996? It was the old hockey arena, and there were plans to make it into a huge St. Louis aquarium. And that fell through, and they tore it down. And there's just a bunch of office spaces there now. Just because something is old, doesn't mean you have to tear it down. Keep it. Keep what you have. And encourage people to open their eyes and look at what's around you. 

You see people walking down the street in St. Louis looking at the ground as they're going. Walk with your head up. Look up, and what you see is pretty amazing. Going on Washington Avenue is wonderful, if you look up and see what's there. And people just don't realize what's here.

St. Louis was one of the biggest brick making places in the world. There were clay deposits within the city limits. That's why we have so many brick buildings in St. Louis, between the big buildings and the houses. People need to appreciate that. Appreciate what we've got before it's gone. That's the biggest thing I'd want to give people

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