Biography: The Photographer


John Stamets, photographer, specializes in documenting historic buildings and properties to the standards of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and Historic American Engineering Record (HAER). He is on the faculty at the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he teaches photography to architecture students.

Stamets studied at Yale (1971) with the late documentary photographer Walker Evans. All of his photography/art projects have been of a documentary nature, beginning with "Taxi Passengers" in 1979. In 1987 his first book was published: Portrait of a Market, about Seattle's Pike Place Market. Then in 1988 he started photographing building construction sites with large format cameras as an art and history project.

In 1996 he began applying HABS/HAER methodology to the construction of important new buildings. The intended audience are future architectural historians. He has applied this approach to the construction of the Experience Music Project in Seattle designed by Frank Gehry; the new BellevueArt Museum in Bellevue, WA designed by Steven Holl; and the new Milwaukee Art Museum designed by Santiago Calatrava. The IIT Campus Center is the first construction site he has photographed in Chicago.

In Seattle he is represented by the Esther Claypool Gallery.