Book
Le Corbusier Secret Photographer By Tim Benton Published by Lars Müller Publishers, £39 Review by Thomas Wensing
With recent exhibitions in the Barbican and MoMA, and a seemingly endless string of recent publications, one would think that the angles for original research would by now have been exhausted, but with Le Corbusier Secret Photographer, Tim Benton has produced an immaculately researched and well-written book that highlights the development of Le Corbusier’s photographic output. Benton can be rightfully called a Corb expert, and his output is prolific: earlier this year he published Le Corbusier’s Pavilion for Zurich and co-authored the massive Le Corbusier Le Grand, and, in 2007, published The Villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret 1920-1930, to name but a few titles in his growing body of work. It is well known that the Swiss architect had an ambivalent attitude towards photography: on the one hand, he relied heavily on professional photography to promote his built work and support his discourse but, on the other, he said that he abandoned photography quickly in his career. Like the cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, he clearly saw photography as a means to an end. Neither shied away from doctoring images of grain silos to make them more purist, so it comes as little surprise that Le Corbusier was not entirely truthful about his relationship to the medium: he owned many, often professional, cameras over the years and he photographed regularly. There was also a period in which the great designer took photography so seriously that his pictures were of publishable quality. It is likely that his keen visual eye was in part derived from his early photographic endeavours and it may explain his insistence on hand-picking professional photographers to photograph his buildings. Lucien Hervé was one of these regulars, and it is said that Corb proved to be somewhat difficult with others. Ezra Stoller, for instance, remembered when he was asked by the Museum of Modern Art to photograph Ronchamp Chapel. Le Corbusier insisted that he would only co-operate if the museum bought two of his paintings. Here, again, the ambiguous nature of the role of painting in his life may be revealed; Stoller was mystified as to why Le Corbusier craved to be acknowledged as a painter when he was such a formidable architect.
The life of Le Corbusier is presented by Benton by way of the cameras he owned and the kind of photographs he took. The book is further split into the two personalities of the man: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and his various photographic campaigns, and Le Corbusier and his cinematic output. With each new camera, ‘Jeanneret’ moved to a different level of skill and style of photography. It is interesting to learn how his development was partly dictated by the technical capacities of the camera and partly by the books he read and the architects he admired. Benton’s command of his subject matter is admirable: he presents his thesis with such clarity and compelling evidence that his sleuthing never becomes boring. We learn of the limitations of the first Bull’s Eye box camera, the use of the so-called sliding front on the semi-professional Hüttig Cupido 80, and why it was
impossible to take certain photographs with this type of camera, even though it was long thought to be owned by Jeanneret and is held by the Fondation Le Corbusier. After the semi-professional work with the second camera, Jeanneret treated himself to a Brownie Kodak, the affordable and ubiquitous camera of the day, and with this camera his photos became much more cinematic and emphatic, less staid. The angles and framing became more unexpected and the dark and light contrasts more striking, as is evidenced in a stunning photo of the Oculus of the Rome Parthenon. The photographic work accompanies the essays to support the narrative, but the chapters are interspersed with photo albums in which Le Corbusier’s various journeys are documented and the photographs thematically arranged. One of my favourite albums is his trip on the SS Conte Biancamano, during which
he obsessively shoots the ocean liner from every possible angle. Pulleys, cranes, mast and winches, the photographs present us with a panoply of nautical artefacts, which, of course, find their way into the built work and paintings. Later in the book, a more intimate and relaxed man is revealed as the photos increasingly focus on friends, family, landscapes, natural forms and disappearing ways of life. These were taken in the late 1930s and reflect the maturing of his work; his shift to more sculptural forms and away from technocratic purism. Benton sets the photographs of Le Corbusier within the context of the photographic and architectural developments of the day. But, above all, he charts his creative development as a photographer in a way that succeeds in revealing more of the personality of this pioneer of modern architecture than the two blockbuster exhibitions were able to do.
This publication reveals more of the personality of Le Corbusier than the two recent blockbuster exhibitions were able to do
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