Corporate photography at Willis Tower

Willis Tower is the 110 story building at 233 South Wacker Drive, 1,451 feet to its architectural top, completed in 1973 and the tallest building in the world from 1973 until 1998. It stands on the Wacker Drive spine at the western edge of the Loop, close to Union Station and the West Loop commuter core that carries most of the neighborhood in each morning. The scale is the part to plan around. A building of this height runs a zoned elevator system, so a floor in an upper bank is a different trip through the building than a floor in a lower one, and a session that touches both is really two setups unless the schedule accounts for it.

United Airlines moved its headquarters into the tower in 2012 from 77 West Wacker, and as of 2019 it was the building's largest tenant at roughly 850,000 square feet across sixteen floors. The rest of the tenancy is the mix a tower of this size collects rather than one company's campus, which in practice means a program here can involve several unrelated organizations, each on its own floor and its own schedule, sharing a production day.

The building's own procedures set the pace more than the equipment does. Confirm dock hours, certificate of insurance requirements and freight elevator access with building management the week before, and reserve a conference room on your own floor rather than counting on a common area. The full lighting setup travels on one cart and clears a standard freight car in a single trip. On the upper floors the windows give a horizon line worth using for leadership portraits when the weather is clear, and we plan those frames for the part of the day the light allows.

We photograph on site, in your own office. If your team is in this building, the notes below are what the day looks like. Nothing here is a claim to a past session in it, and no tenant named is a client unless it says so elsewhere on this site.