Adrian McNeece

A flip of a coin initially led Adrian McNeece into a career in interior design. He talks to David Land about giving it all up to become an interiors and architectural photographer

“I think my father was quietly proud when I started to do something more overtly creative than commercial interior design”, says Adrian McNeece. “He said to me when I was young, ‘The difference between artists and designers is that artists solve their own problems and designers solve other peoples’ problems.’ Although there’s a perception of design as a creative industry, you’re not really putting a lot of yourself into the interior design of Merrill Lynch’s headquarters. It’s a commercial enterprise. You’re working to budgets and deadlines.

“I left school in 1982 when I was 18, and went to work for my father who was an interior designer in Glasgow. I worked for him for about two years, at the same time as which I attended Glasgow School of Art, studying interior design one day a week. Then I studied it full time at Glasgow College of Building and Printing. Part of that course involved photography, and in 1984 I literally tossed a coin as to whether I would study photography or interior design. I had done so much photography as a hobby that it was a serious proposition.

“I bought my first camera in 1979, a manual Pentax SLR with a bayonet mount, moving on sometime later to my father’s Nikon FM. My father had a darkroom in the attic of our house as part of his business. He would come back home with films his staff had taken on site visits, and for pocket money I would get £3 for every film that I processed and 10p for every black and white print I produced. He made me fill in timesheets because he charged for my time; so I know that I clocked up about 3500 hours in the darkroom before I was 17.

“I would come back from school at about 5.30, get the films to process, and go upstairs to the darkroom, which was quite high spec for the time with a beautiful Leica enlarger, so I had a good grounding in processing and printing, and an understanding of the importance of composing a photograph.

“I continued to take photographs while an undergraduate interior designer, mostly of my friends, portraits, and the countryside. Living in Glasgow, I had the opportunity to go out to the Highlands. I was impulsive - photographing whatever was there. I had a couple of tutors who had their own darkroom in the interior design department, and I’d often make use of it.”

On graduating, McNeece moved to London and started working in architectural practices, mainly on corporate office interiors and projects for the big banks, pharmaceuticals, advertising agencies and so on.

“I became relatively successful as a corporate interior designer”, he says, “while maintaining photography as a hobby. I didn’t photograph corporate interiors back then, I just took holiday snaps, although on holiday it was mainly architecture that I photographed!”

McNeece turned 40 in 2005, and had what he calls, ‘a bit of a midlife crisis’. “I regretted not having pursued photography more seriously”, he says. “At a dinner party, some friends and ex-colleagues saw my photographs, and said I should start doing it seriously and charging for it, saying they’d get me started and give me projects. And they weren’t small projects. They were multi-million pound fit-outs that I had the opportunity to photograph.

“My wife and I had a mortgage to pay, but really had no debts to worry about. I’d got to the point where I could take a financial risk for a few months to try and get some work through the door, and so I decided to go for it. My wife, who is an osteopath, has been very supportive. There have been times when she’s paid the mortgage because I’ve been unable to do so. We discussed my career change at the outset, and I would not have done it without her support.

“I looked at what other people were charging and the quality of work out there. I tried not to pitch my fees at a level that was way too high - I had to get my foot in the door - but I found fairly quickly that I had to put my rates up, because the lower your rates are, the less seriously you are taken. I’ve had to put my rates up by about four times in the last 21/2 years to put myself on a par with people who have been doing it for a lot longer.

“I got a call from a colleague who used to work for an architect in London, who said they might have a commission for me. I was terrified. I didn’t even have a decent tripod with a spirit level in it, although I had a Nikon D1X. I went down there, and I was sweaty with anticipation and tension, but it made me completely focused on getting good results.

“When I presented the photographs, they couldn’t believe it. They said they would start using me, rather than the guy they had been using for years. Those years that I spent as a teenager in the darkroom have helped greatly with my composition and sense of light, while having worked for 18 years in interior design, I knew the level of detail and range of angles required for an interior shoot.

“I recently looked at some of my early photographs. My father had got me to photograph his designs for an IBM factory in 1983. I couldn’t believe it: some of my earliest photographs included the first IBM PC being manufactured. It reminded me of how long I’ve been doing industrial and corporate interiors. I’ve kind of gone full circle.

“I need to do more external architecture. I’ve had one commission, which was to do the internal shots and some of the periphery buildings of the Heathrow Terminal Five lounges for British Airways, but it wasn’t the opportunity that I expected it to be. The nature of architecture versus interiors is: interiors are more bread and butter and the work is more regular. Getting that great exterior architecture commission is something I’m still chasing.

“I’m using a DX format Nikon D2X, and saving up for the full frame D3X. It’s a bit of a nuisance converting lens focal lengths by a factor 1.5, and I think it will benefit me using a 12mm wide angle lens full format, especially for interiors.

“There was a period in the 1990s when I didn’t really touch a camera at all and, of course, that was the time when everything went digital. Two and three megapixel cameras started coming out, costing about £600; the results were rubbish, but I was really enamoured by the accessibility of it.

“There was a parallel digital revolution in design, and I was an early adopter of all sorts of technology. I started using computers for drawing in 1988; learning how to use DOS - you had to in those days - with a large screen for drawing and a smaller monitor for information. Then Windows kicked off, and by about 1994 everyone was using Microsoft. After that, Photoshop became prevalent, and I picked up all these fancy bits of kit. Digital has developed so much in the last 10 years that it has allowed someone like me to go back to my passion and be much more successful. I’ve invested £4000 in an Apple Mac, and I have an A2 Epson printer, which is ideal to do my own exhibition size prints.

“I sometimes use Google Advertising to try and get new work. If you type ‘photography’ into a search engine, you’ll get tens of thousands of results. The key to narrowing it down is predicting the phrases that people search for. You create your ad putting in ‘interior photographer London’, and if people put in those words or if it’s an exact phrase match, then your ad is going to come higher up. You have to bid a fixed price, so if I say I’ll pay up to £4 per click, if you bid higher and the search matches what the individual is searching, for then your result will come higher.

“Advertising works if you can spend a lot of money, but if you don’t have a budget it’s very difficult to get the results you’d like. It’s more important to have a good website. Bite Digital designed mine. When I was researching, I noticed that a lot of the websites I liked were done by Bite, and my competitors tend to like Flash rather than HTML. I was happy to go ahead with a Flash-based site, because it gives it that slick feel. To my mind, you actually have to pay a premium for simplicity, because from a photography site perspective, the simpler the better.

“I’ve also had made an A5 double-sided, matt, laminated, colour postcard. I created my own database of architects from the London RIBA directory, and I mailed them postcards and business cards and rates. If you send out 500 postcards and you get one job – it’s a great result.

“Plus, of course, there’s word of mouth. I had two sizeable commissions from Bloxham Housing Association. I met its chair and we just got on. He liked art, and commissioned me to photograph some local scenes for the office walls, which led to further commissions of a similar nature. We got together and created a competition a few months ago for Bloxham Secondary School, which I judged with the local council. My photographs were exhibited along with the kids’ at Bloxham Civic Centre.

“I had an exhibition last October sponsored by Interface, one of the world’s biggest flooring and carpet manufacturers , at its showroom in Clerkenwell, London. I hung about 34 A2 mounted photographs, entitled Patterns and Possibilities, shot in Berlin, Venice, London and New York, going back to 2003. We had about 100 people on the opening night, and I sold 13 prints, at £300-£450 each.

“I don’t go out with my portfolio all that often. It’s something I’d consider if I could be focused and thought there were realistic prospects, but I’m conscious of wasting time, and time is money. Being freelance certainly makes you much more conscious of what you earn and what goes out of the door. It’s different when you get a fixed income at the end of each month, but all of a sudden it’s the end of the year and you’ve got to do your accounts, and you look back on what you spent and what you earned, and you think, ‘crikey’. My accountant advised me to get VAT registered. I haven’t broken the threshold yet, but it does make you appear to have more gravitas.

“There are days - possibly even every day! - where I think I’ve made a dreadful mistake - especially on the days when you’ve got no work, and there are an awful lot of those. To have six weeks between commissions is very hard, and then when your commission comes, it’s only a day’s work or maybe two or three if you’re lucky.

“My income, which was secure, has plummeted. My outlook on life has changed dramatically. I’ve had to balance my desire to continue photography with the ability to live the lifestyle I had before. We’re talking about getting rid of the flash car and buying a £4000 second hand Volvo.

“There comes a point where you’ve gone so far down the line that you’ve passed the point of no return, and even though there are still large gaps between commissions, we’re hoping that they’ll become shorter. I’m aware that it can take five years before you get what you can call regular work and a reputation, but it’s a long term commitment. There are days when it definitely hurts financially and emotionally so you question your motives, but that’s what life is.

“Realistically, I’m working with architects, joinery companies, building product suppliers – all the businesses that are being hit in the current economic downturn, and the knock on effect goes through the whole chain so we all have to be conscious of that. I think it’s only a matter of time before I get more work, but it might get worse before it gets better. The best I can hope for is that the next commission will be a big one and it will lead to a further commission from the same client. That’s what every commercial photographer is hoping for: regular work.”