Interview by Lara Southern

Vicente Wolf is an acclaimed Cuban born interior photographer and designer based in Manhattan. An avid collector, with over four decades in the industry, Vicente’s passion for international travel, art, and interior design are illuminated in his photographs, which capture his globally renowned aesthetic of elegance and restraint. A celebrated visionary in his field, Vicente has photographed and authored five exquisite books, including Learning to See: Bringing the World Around You Into Your Home, 2002, Lifting the Curtain on Design, 2010 and a cache of rare materials from his private collection Frida Kahlo: Photographs of Myself and Others, 2010.

"You’re known to be an intrepid traveler. What places have influenced your work the most?

They all do. Because, in the visual filing cabinet in my mind, wherever I go there's something that gets filed in there, whether it’s in the Himalayas or in the jungle. There's always something that sort of gets “stuck-on” to my sensibility. In Egypt—a sense of scale. If you go to Burma—the shimmer and the reflective quality, the gold. Little mirrors that are inlaid into details of architecture. China, Japan—the sensibility, and how you look at things. I mean, every place.

How does your Cuban heritage enter into your designs?

How does the Cuban come in? It comes in with the sense of light. It comes in with a slight sense of humor, with a casual way of looking at things. And certainly, white is very much…— not that if you go to Cuba there's a lot of white— but there’s… in my mind, a sense of [a] reflective quality, which is what white really brings into the spaces. A sense of not having boundaries, a sense of architecture, a sense of being a canvas, which my designs are reflected onto.

Has being inside so much this past year been… fruitful… in terms of inspiring new designs or, like for so many of us, has it been a creative struggle?

Well, for the first 12 weeks, I was at my beach house. So, that was inspiring because you're looking at the ocean and you're out in the garden and all of that. But coming back into the office I had a newfound appreciation of working with other people, and bouncing ideas, and… all my books are here. So, I miss that. I miss the idea of that: the creative process, having your juices flowing.

When I was at the beach, I was still designing, working on projects. And I've been working all the way through. So, my work was never affected, until three months ago, when things really slowed down. And that was hard because there was nothing to bite into.

Does viewing your interiors through the camera lens ever inspire further edits to the designs of the spaces themselves?

No, but it has changed how I design spaces more generally… because the different types of lenses that you're using create different visual vignettes. What this has taught me was to not necessarily look at a room in totality, but to look at it from different angles, at the different scales that a lens brings into it. So, that really was a big change for me, because as I'm designing a space, I'm looking at it through wide-angle lens, or a narrow lens. That has been sort of assimilated into my creative process. It took a little bit to start to photograph a room through a photographer's point of view—not through a designer's point of view—because the designer wants to see everything, and that doesn't necessarily make the best photographs.

You’ve authored five design books thus far. How has your photography evolved over the years?

Well, I'm a slow learner, so it's taken me years. I’m dyslexic. Reading a book on how to photograph interiors does not work for me. It has to be something that I learn by absorbing…

For the first seven or eight years, I photographed on film. That was a totally different experience because we had to be measuring the light at different angles, in different places, and then trying to come up with the best figures to be able to photograph. And now, it doesn't matter. When you were doing film, you didn't know: is it right? Is it wrong? Did I hit it? Did I not? Now you see it, you erase it, you reshoot it.

I think that the better you are as a photographer… the more you miss film because the film brought a depth and texture, a clarity to the shot, that you sort of lose with digital. Because in digital, it's all perfect. And sometimes, not being perfect could make a better photograph.

I use a Nikon. I used to use a Pentax but the Nikon—it’s amazing what it can do. Begrudgingly, I have come to admire the possibilities that the Nikon allows for. I still don't know how to use every trick that the camera has, and I've had it now for like five years. But it works. I mean, this will be the fifth book. And I've shot with it for the New York Times, for all the different design magazines. So it's fine.

Would you say you have a signature photographic style when capturing your spaces?

I don't think so. I mean, I like rooms to be very bright. I love creating vignettes visually. I can't say that I am so evolved. I know that there's a signature when I design, but I don't know that I repeat the signature when I photograph.

I love the cat. This is part of the design point of view because, in my work, I like high, medium, low— which is a design principle of Japanese floral arrangements. You can see the lamp, you see the large picture, you see the small picture, then you see the cat.

I'm working on a new book of photographs. And I said to the person I was working with: I want this to be the cover. And they said, "Well, but you're not showing that much. A lot of people might just glance over it and not know." But I think that that cover shows not just a pretty room or a pretty setting, it shows an eye. And I think that, to me, that would be the book that I would pick up rather than one that has the “perfect” room. My colleague said, "Well, why don't we put that in the back cover?" I said, "Okay, great.” When you're working on a book, as much as you want to control everything, there's still the need for compromise.

Many interiors that you’ve photographed and designed boast large art collections— how do you go about photographing art, and does it affect your design of the space?

As a designer, when I'm photographing a room, I'm using my knowledge of interiors to balance it, to put things in places which—even if it's not exactly where everything normally belongs—give a little logic to the room. The clients have the art, and you get to work with some amazing artwork, so that's always great. As a photographer, as a designer, you get to—it’s like you touch them. Not that I touch them. But you have an intimate moment with it.

I’ve been collecting photography for 40 years, and it's such an amazing medium because you can capture an emotion such that each time you see the photograph, you feel that emotion again. And there aren't that many mediums that you can say that about. Yes, you can look at an extraordinary painting and be moved each time you see it. But a photograph, it can be taken by anybody and it can still create a great impact. A wonderful medium.