It is truly an odd experience when a building speaks to you. This occurred in September, 1975 when I, and my kids and my first wife, Carol, were guests of her well-to-do parents in their second home in Boca Raton Florida. Rat’s Mouth, I recall thinking, was certainly an incongruous name for such a posh vacation spot.

The event I speak of occurred at the Boca Raton Club, a swanky resort facing the Atlantic Ocean north of Miami Beach. Palm trees, door men in special garb, a grand port cochere, display windows with expensive watches and fancy golf shirts, men in fine leather shoes, slinky pants and gold jewelry spoke of a lifestyle and level of wealth I had never before experienced. I felt like a farmer among kings. On our first visit to the Club, we walked through the lobby then turned to the right heading along a concrete walk for the beach. The energetic surf was on our left and a long white curving wall on our right. The wall ended in a set of stairs that led to an upper level. The steps rose in two flights separated by a narrow landing. At the top was a larger landing and above that was the Florida sky, luminous and exquisite. As we passed the stairs I felt something magical occur as if the stair were communicating with me, perhaps not speaking to me in words, as I had suggested in my first sentence, but there was some form of interaction that may simply have been based on a sudden appreciation for what I was seeing. But it was real and it was palpable and it was forever memorable.

Although I had my camera with me, as I usually do on vacation, I don’t recall an instant intention to photograph the stair. But on trips back and forth from the snack shop or the toilets, I soon realized that there was a photograph here to be discovered. The stair was speaking to me. I still have slides of all the tries that missed the mark, shots with my son and with both kids sitting or standing on the steps and in or out of the shadows in the style of Henri Cartier Bresson.

But what ultimately turned out to become Florida Light was an utterly straightforward shot of the stair alone. I had to search for that perfect nexus of conditions: the sunlight at the right angle, the right exposure for highlight and detail, the right height and angle of my camera. The stairs and the stepped wall flanking it wanted to say sculpture. I needed the saturated Florida light to hit that thick stepped wall at just the right angle to reflect the light of the horizontal planes onto the glowing risers as if the maintenance staff had not turned off the concealed artificial light sources from the night before.

Florida Light, which I took in September of 1975, represents an important marker in the body of my photographic studies. It achieves what I try to achieve in my architecture and interior design work: a simple artistic statement arrived it through an intersection of light, form and color. Even the fact that the simple railing on the balcony is painted white, rather than being another material, adds to the simplicity of the overall statement. I particularly like the difference between the cerulean blue sky and the darker blue-green color of the steps. I also like the way the sunlight just grazes the top of the dark-green bristly hedge, the edge of the steps, and the small chink in the edge of the vertical plane of the stepped wall that flanks the blue-painted steps. There is also something about the way the slight change of plane in the top of the hedge resonates with the top of the main landing and the top of the wall beyond where the stairs end (horizontal planes that are not visible from my line of sight). These are the qualities that continue to speak to me and that once beckoned me to capture them as I walked past this simple but monumental architectural composition on the edge of the sea.