A: Well, people just love to see that picture. It represents a quality of architecture and photography that is not very well-observed. But the ironic thing is that when I took the exposure in my 4x5 camera, I honestly didn't know what I had. I saw something--a mood and a scene. But I didn't realize I had made what would literally be one of my masterpieces.
Q: It seems silly to ask, but who are those two women?
A: Pierre Koenig, the architect, told me he wanted to bring some of his students when I photographed the house, and I told him to have them bring their girlfriends; I'll use them as models. I never imagined this picture, though--we were doing photographs of the interior of the house. Then I happened to step outside, and I saw the view, and the girls in the house, chatting. I thought, "Wow, this might make a fine picture!" So I set my camera up outside, turned the lights off in the house, and exposed the film for about seven minutes, to capture the lights of the city below. Then we set off a flash inside the house to get the girls on film, and that was it.
