Architecture is a spatial and material reality bound to its perceptual nature, created from the architect’s scopic and analytical baggage, documented and disseminated through an imagery filtered by the photographer’s eye. The architect decants reality to nurture his design process from the visual storage of memory, while the photographer transfers built forms in a two-dimensional reality. The gaze – and its photographic capture – is the vector that illuminates architecture, before and after construction.
From their respective angles two books present outstanding examples of the architect who photographs and the photographer of architecture. We learn about the personal photo archive of Norman Foster; we knew of his penchant for drawing as an analytical tool and design instrument, but not of this more private pursuit which since student days has had him recording in slides all the travels and interests that have nourished his practice. On the other hand, the reputed career of Hélène Binet as an architecture photographer finds definitive recognition through a celebration of her intense, synthetic, serious, elegant, poetic vision of built space, opposed to the affected gaze flooding architectural propaganda with vacuous images.
Foster’s publication stemmed from the 2023 exhibition at the Pompidou, where a large number of 35 mm color slides preserved in his archive were shown, backlit. It occurred to him to transfer those ‘visual records’ to a photobook, with no other intention than to print out 135 digitalized slides – selected by the team in charge of the archive in his foundation – and with no other discourse than that which emerges from a walk-through, spanning four decades (1961-2000), of the architect’s ‘interests’ and ‘passions’: vehicles and aircraft, art, design, urban landscapes, and architecture itself. Foster visits the works of modern masters and with his camera sometimes takes the iconic postcard picture of the building, but in the best of cases catches details revealing their essence. Following the trail of the Eameses, Venturi, Rossi, Rudofsky, or Pawson, the photographer Foster shows his penchant for documenting the ordinary, in particular the topographies of road movies: the gazes of Eggleston, Meyerowitz, or Shore palpitate in their snapshots, reinforced by the patina of the vintage slide.
For their part Marco Iuliano and Martino Stierli have captured in their respective texts the full scope of Binet’s career, from biographical aspects to conceptual ones underlying her syncretic view of architecture. To properly present the intensity of her camera work – influenced from the start by Lucien Hervé’s and faithful to the large analog format – the select photographic catalog is organized not by architectural codes, but around six themes (lines, light, interplays, narratives, sequences, abstraction) that speak of the need to realize that the best architectural photography is not explicitly about architecture, but about the autonomous artistic readings that it can convey, focused in Binet’s case on the articulation and modulation of light upon the built surface.
