Robert Lautman, at 85; was famed architectural photographer

He was 85 and lived in Washington.

“Lighting is everything,’’ he told Residential Architect magazine last year. “Somebody once said, ‘Architectural photography consists of two things: knowing where to stand and knowing what time to stand there.’ That, of course, has to do with light. The rest is just technology.’’

Others might disagree.

“The subtle play of light and shadow in his photographs captures and compliments the nuances of architectural design,’’ the American Institute of Architects said in 1973 when the organization gave Mr. Lautman its highest award. I

In February, Chrysanthe Broikos, a curator at the National Building Museum, called him the undisputed dean of Washington architectural photographers.

Mr. Lautman - sought after by architects, documentary filmmakers, and magazine editors - created a series of 1850s-style platinum prints of Monticello that were used in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on Thomas Jefferson, and those photos became the subject of a book.

A misty image of architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen’s house in New England’s Berkshires hangs in the offices of the Washington chapter of the AIA “and never fails to elicit sighs from visitors,’’ the chapter’s magazine reported in 2001.

His pro bono photos of the old Pension Building, before it had become the National Building Museum, helped save that structure.

Official National Park Service guidebooks to Washington use his images of the city.

Over a 40-year span, he patiently documented the construction of Washington National Cathedral.

Robert Clayton Lautman was born in Butte, Mont., on Nov. 8, 1923.

With his first box camera, he shot photos for his junior high school yearbook.

He attended Montana State University in Bozeman for a year before heading east.

He worked briefly as a copyboy at The Washington Post and then enlisted in the Army during World War II.

The Army made him a combat photographer in the Pacific. He volunteered to parachute onto Corregidor, although he had never before made a jump.

He landed safely, shot combat scenes, and ran under fire all the way to deliver his film to a PT boat.

Mr. Lautman twice received the Bronze Star Medal for his work on Corregidor and for volunteering with a band of Army Rangers who conducted a daring raid of the Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines, liberating 513 prisoners of the Japanese.

The raid has been the subject of movies and books.

After the war, he trained with several photo studios in New York, and in 1948, he set up his own Washington photo practice in a stable behind the Cosmos Club.

By 1954, he was toting as standard equipment “a lineman’s pole climbers and safety belt for shooting from telephone poles and trees,’’ a Post story said.

In 1996, he was still going out on a limb, dangling from the end of a construction crane at the cathedral to get the right angle on a scene.

In 1954, Mr. Lautman was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

He was one of 11 area residents who refused to answer the committee’s questions that year on constitutional grounds.

The experience didn’t seem to harm his career.

He soon gained the respect of modernist architects, who became loyal clients.

In the 1960s, developer James Rouse sent him across the country, and his national reputation began to grow.

The appearance of his work in Home and Garden, House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, Elle, Smithsonian, and other magazines helped, too.

“Every new assignment is a crash course,’’ he said in 1997.

His son Andrew, who worked with him as a photographer, died in 2001.

He leaves his wife of 42 years, Kay Partney Lautman of Washington; a son, Jonathan of Livingston, N.J.; a sister; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Robert Lautman donated his 30,000 prints, transparencies, and negatives to the National Building Museum, which has displayed his work this year in a rotating exhibit.