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David Robinson Photography

Brand, website, and portfolio relaunch for photographer David Robinson, timed to his 88th birthday and built to hold more than 50 years of work, from books introduced by Ernst Haas, Joyce Carol Oates, and Dean Koontz to prints in the collections of the Getty and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Client
David Robinson, photographer
Based
Sausalito, California
Scope
Brand, website, and ongoing site management
Result
Five decades of work, live at davidrobinsonphotos.com
A church tower and sky reflected in a rain puddle among the cobblestones of Rome’s Piazza Navona, glowing gold
Rome, Piazza Navona, from Italian Reflections
The challenge

Half a century of seeing, ready for a fresh frame

David Robinson picked up a camera in Africa after college, didn’t know how to use it, and taught himself by looking. Fifty-plus years later, his work spans reflections in Roman puddles, a decade of SoHo walls, the cemeteries of Europe, and experiments with Polaroid’s giant 20 × 24 camera, with exhibitions from the International Center of Photography to Milan.

To mark his 88th birthday, David wanted to relaunch his website: one home for his major series, his experiments, and his travels, with room for the photographs he had never printed or published, presented with the clarity his abstractions ask for.

What we did

  • Brand

    The David Robinson · photography · wordmark: a quiet, classic signature that frames the work without competing with it.

  • Website

    Designed and built davidrobinsonphotos.com: a full-screen homepage carousel of signature images, his Bio, an expandable CV of exhibitions, collections, books, and reviews, and a Contact page, all in a quiet, white-walled layout that lets the photographs carry the room.

  • Portfolio architecture

    Organized more than 230 images into three collections: Major Works, from Beautiful Death to Italian Reflections; Experimentation, from Homage to Jackson Pollock to Hidden Persuaders; and Travel Photography across Cuba, India, Italy, Mexico, Paris, and Africa.

  • Series presentation

    Paired every series with David’s own words, its book details, and its print editions, from silver gelatin and Cibachrome to dye transfer, so collectors see each body of work the way he made it.

  • Site management

    Ongoing care and upkeep: adding new series and unpublished photographs as David releases them, and keeping the site running smoothly.

Delivered as a white-label design and development partner.

The davidrobinsonphotos.com home page: a full-screen black-and-white photo of Van Gogh’s grave at Anvers-sur-Oise with a Visit Gallery button
davidrobinsonphotos.com
The Major Works page: the Beautiful Death book cover beside its details, exhibition print editions, and David’s notes on the Cibachrome process
Major Works: every series with its book and print editions
The result
Relaunched at 88 davidrobinsonphotos.com

David’s reflections, cemeteries, walls, and wanderings now live together in one gallery, with room to keep growing as he shares the unpublished work from his 50-plus years of travel and photography.

“I am an observer, not a reporter; my photos belong on the op-ed page, not the front page.”

David Robinson
From the portfolio
A Venice street scene layered with a passenger’s silhouette in a window reflection, from Italian Reflections A white marble mourning figure draped across a tomb, from Beautiful Death Layered, torn posters on a SoHo wall, including a yellow Kammermusik bill, from SoHo Walls A figure in white walking along Havana’s seawall under a deep blue sky A crowd of worshippers beneath strands of colorful streamers in Delhi Back-lit magazine pages merging fashion models into one image, from Hidden Persuaders

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