Inside Apple TV's Severance building for black and white photography
It's in New Jersey, it's called Bell Works, here's some story about it, along with b&w noir shots.
Standing in Bell Works feels wrong at first. I've seen this place before as Lumon Industries in Apple TV+’s Severance. The long corridors, the brutalist concrete, the scale of everything. But in the real life, people are there. Kids. Coffee shops. A library. A theater! It’s not the sterile corporate nightmare from the show, but the very opposite, a rich and beautiful mid-centiry architecture building. Even though, I did black and white shots to portray and maintain such solitude.
The building for black and white photography. I arrived there right before sunset and was able to do some daylight shots, but the fun began when lights went off, the mist took over the parking lot, giving it back the feeling that the place was actually perfect for the TV show.
The location manager for AppleTV, who found Bell Works, said their “heads exploded” when they first saw it. The building had just been restored. He said: ”It’s like they just finished it. It was meant to be.”, and I had the same impression when I was there yesterday with my camera.
Eero Saarinen designed Bell Works in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was Bell Labs, an incubator where major technological innovations happened.
The GFX 100s and 110mm f/2 felt right for this. Medium format captures every detail in Saarinen’s concrete and glass. The lens compresses those vast corridors into something more intimate but still imposing.
Converting to Tri-X emulation removed the warmth. Just form, shadow, and weight. In black and white, the building sits in the same space as the show, not welcoming, but not hostile. The grain makes it timeless. Could be 1962, could be now, could be the fictional present of Severance.
Bell Works is in Holmdel, New Jersey, and is open to the public, here's the famous water tower station that appear many times in the show, taken with a tripod and 13 seconds exposure. This one I didn't want to do black and white, but a Fujicolor Pro 400H emulation, powered by DxO FilmPack 8.
If you want to do your own film conversions departing from a digital file, use the coupon RAF15 in DxO to buy the FilmPack8. I don't get a penny out of that, so my conflict of interest is zero. I just like recommending good software.
Here's a shot from the whole building, including parking lot, water tower, and snow.
I guess that now I need to go there again under snow to make similar winter shots. Stay tuned!
