Buildings Come Alive in Her Lens: Thirty Years of Hélène Binet

The architect Daniel Libeskind once said of her work: "Every photograph Binet takes reveals a building's achievement, its force, its emotion, and its vulnerability."

On the third floor of the Power Station of Art in Shanghai there is an architectural photography show — "Hélène Binet: Thirty Years in Dialogue with Light and Shadow" — with more than a hundred pictures, all shot on film, by the French-Swiss photographer Hélène Binet.

The buildings in Hélène's lens are never whole. She photographs fragments. "The first thing a photographer has to learn," she has said, "is how to leave things out." Instead of the whole building she points the camera at light and shadow, at outline, at how spaces sit against each other, and lets a piece of structure and texture stand for a much larger architectural idea.

Gu Zheng, a professor at Fudan University's School of Journalism, thinks her pictures come closer to "a visual critique of a work of architecture, carried out by means of photography." She does more than record a building; she reads it again from her own point of view. Her lens lets architects see their own buildings from somewhere else, and sometimes what they see comes back to them as inspiration.

Hélène Binet was born in Switzerland in 1959 and studied photography at the European Institute of Design. After graduating she spent a short time as a photographer at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, shooting dance and theater. In the mid-1980s she moved to London with her husband, Raoul Bunschoten, then teaching at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, and her interest shifted toward buildings. The first architect she photographed was John Hejduk: his apartment building in Berlin, Germany; the House of the Suicide and House of the Mother of the Suicide in the United States and the Czech Republic; a shelter in Oslo, Norway; the Wall House in the Netherlands, and others.

Shooting Hejduk changed the way she has looked at architecture ever since. "You shouldn't let 'how you're supposed to shoot it' shape your own point of view," she has said. "You should try different ways." Out of that came her thinking about light and shadow, about spatial structure, about how a building sits in its surroundings. She wants architecture to be more than "dry, lifeless architecture" — she wants it to take us into different levels of understanding. A building, she believes, can "keep reflecting your own feelings," can be "full of emotion," and can hold a conversation: between buildings, between a building and its architect, between a building and whoever is looking at it.

"Dialogue" is also a central theme of the show. Hélène laid out the rooms herself, leaning on that idea throughout, to build a space and an atmosphere the visitor can imagine into.

Walk into the gallery corridor and the first thing you meet is the Suzhou gardens she photographed for this show in 2018. Her garden pictures are about fragments of wall and space, and about how the architecture stands with the plants and rocks around it. She took the flaking, broken patches on the garden walls as her way in — which is why a garden, in her eyes, is "an enclosed space that is still natural."

On the wall opposite the gardens hang photographs of the walkways at the Acropolis in Athens, designed by the Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis. Again she shoots a fragment: a mass of fitted stone. A visitor can hardly picture the Acropolis from these stones, but the sense of history comes through, and it answers the Suzhou gardens across the room. Hélène hopes that "when people see the photographs, they will already have some feeling for the atmosphere of these buildings, even the ones they may never have been to."

In the show she hangs her photographs of Le Corbusier's La Tourette convent next to the ones she made at the Jantar Mantar observatory in India. At Jantar Mantar she framed selectively, going after the shadows the astronomical instruments throw rather than the instruments themselves — much as she did at Le Corbusier's convent.

In her gallery talk she said: "I wanted to focus on light and shadow, and above all on the part shadow plays. Sometimes shadow marks the passing of time, as it does at Jantar Mantar. Through its shadows the observatory can tell us about time changing, about the future, about the turn of the seasons. This series is very simple and direct, but I saw a very close connection between it and Le Corbusier's work. And Le Corbusier himself went to Jantar Mantar."

At the end of the show she puts Zaha Hadid's Riverside Museum in Glasgow beside her own pictures of the Atacama Desert in Chile and the Swiss Alps. She wanted to bring out the "energy" you can feel in Hadid's buildings and drawings, an energy that makes her think of the movement of the earth's crust. "There is a very strong echo between the long curves of nature and the curves of the building."

The show has no fixed route. You can start and finish at any single picture. Hélène also hopes visitors will strike up their own dialogue with the works and the buildings, "the way you would with a book, or a dream" — so that even without having seen the buildings, they can let their minds run.

Worth noting: Hélène still works on film, and she developed the black-and-white Suzhou pictures in this show with her own hands. She has nothing against digital, though. As she puts it: "Whether the light touches your film or your sensor doesn't matter. What matters is the thing you are photographing — you need a tool that expresses that object well, that expresses that building well."

On April 19, Hélène Binet sat down with Gu Zheng of Fudan University for a talk called "Dancing with Architecture." They covered Gu's reading of her work, her own thinking about architecture and photography, and what thirty years of work have taught her.

What follows is a transcript, edited for length and clarity.

Gu: Gu Zheng, professor at Fudan University's School of Journalism, researcher at Fudan's Center for Information and Communication Studies, and deputy director of Fudan's Center for Visual Culture Studies. He took his doctorate in comparative culture studies at Osaka Prefecture University, Japan, in 1998, and has served as a final-round judge of the 56th World Press Photo Contest.

Hélène: Hélène Binet, whose photography has mostly taken European modernist and postmodernist architecture as its subject, and has lately turned to natural landscapes and to old Asian buildings. Her work follows certain details in the architecture of John Hejduk, Daniel Libeskind, Sigurd Lewerentz, Dimitris Pikionis, Ludwig Leo, Le Corbusier, Peter Zumthor and Zaha Hadid.

Gu: Two months ago someone from PSA got in touch to say a photographer like this was going to have a show here. At the time I carried a kind of prejudice about "architectural photography" — most of the building pictures I had seen were made to promote buildings, the sort you find in architecture magazines. Photography with a fairly clear communicative purpose.

But Hélène's photography can't simply be filed under "architectural photography." Even in her talk she described many buildings as shelters for a soul. Her material comes from architecture, but the work isn't only about architecture. It is about whether a building has a soul at all, or what kind of soul lives in it. It is work that interprets architecture. In that sense her photography — through architecture, architecture as something human culture produced — carries a particular spiritual meaning, and at the same time draws out the human spiritual possibilities hidden inside a building. This kind of photography also breaks open our rather closed idea of what photography is: that a photograph can only be determined by its subject. In her work, architecture this powerful — and these buildings all have a powerful presence of their own — comes at a photographer with something like overwhelming force.

In the dialogue with that force the photographer finds her own subjectivity for real. She isn't crushed by it. She works very subjectively, from her own understanding of the building, her own understanding of architecture as a cultural product, and goes looking for something of her own. She expresses what is inside the building and, at the same time, what she herself feels through it. Her work has a great deal to teach us.

This show also includes a group of pictures of the gardens of Suzhou, in China. And here you notice something. Western architecture, whether stone or the concrete that came later, is a hard solid mass. The presence and the force that a hard mass gives off, drawn out by light and shadow, is in a way relatively masculine.

But standing in front of Hélène's Suzhou pictures, we find a very warm conversation with our own souls. Facing different light and shadow, different buildings, she works to find the psychology of a people and a culture hidden behind the architecture. So the Suzhou photographs feel soft and warm to look at — nothing like what the Western buildings before them gave us.

Hélène: Not every part of making the work is rational. For myself, I usually compare it to music. If you are a musician you need a score. Then you need strings, an instrument, to express that score. I think there is a lot in common here. I need to understand the score, just as with a building I need to understand how it was built. Once I know the principle behind it, I know this may be a very unusual piece of music, I know where its fine, delicate parts are, and then I can read it.

I may pay attention to a part of a building that other people wouldn't. As a photographer I have no raw material to shape. We take our inspiration from what other people have built, and then we choose what to keep and what to drop. When I shoot, I have to leave parts of a building out. Sometimes I feel there are stories in a building, something that lets me string different works and different ideas together.

Gu: Your Suzhou pictures have none of the hard tone of your Western buildings — they have the wet quality of ink painting. In a place like that, were you also treating Chinese ink painting as a way for photography to carry mood?

Hélène: In fact it happened very naturally. I didn't think about it at the start. Actually shooting in Suzhou was a wonderful experience. The brushstrokes of painters from thousands of years ago may be very close to the marks left on the walls of the Suzhou gardens. I felt I needed to leave blank space, to open that emptiness up slowly, not to fill the frame. And at the bottom and the top of the frame I wanted to let in things like the cracks in the walls. It was probably a gradual thing — I got there and I felt it.

Gu: Did you decide on architecture as your subject right at the start? I feel I shouldn't — can't — call you an architectural photographer. You chose architecture as what your photography works through. So did you decide, at the very beginning of your career, to make architecture the main source of your art?

Hélène: At the start I actually shot many different things, dance and theater among them. Later I was lucky enough to meet well-known architects like Hadid. People at the time were asking whether architecture might hold other possibilities. I went to a lot of lectures and looked at a great many of Hadid's drafts and sketches. I found that behind a building there is a great deal of the architect's own expression, a lot of underlying concepts and ideas. I could never be an architect, but as a photographer I can photograph space — I can photograph architectural space. I also hope to spur young people on, to get them thinking about how we can look at architecture with different eyes, from different angles.

Gu: How do architects react to your work, and what do they say about it? In a sense, from an architect's point of view, your work can't be counted as photography of their buildings, because some of the pieces are extremely fragmentary — through your handling of light and shadow they become completely abstract works. How do architects react when they see them?

Hélène: They have certainly said a lot of kind things. John once told me that seeing my work reminded him of the picture in his head when he first wanted to build that building. To me that is the highest praise: it means I caught it. Hadid also told me she got inspiration from my work. I think that's wonderful — some pieces reminded her of the past, some of the future.

There is something else. Architects read my work in different ways. Hadid always said, "I love your work," and she wanted me to photograph her buildings; sometimes for a show, sometimes for a book, she would ask me to shoot them. I think there is a point where I met her career: I caught a very powerful energy in her work, an energy that is missing from some other pictures of it.

Some architects want only one point of view. They don't want a lot of different photographers interpreting things. They think: if you want to know what my building is like, come and look at it. Of course that isn't always possible — sometimes we publish work shot from my point of view. It depends on what a given architect makes of photography.

Gu: In a sense your photography is a visual critique of an architect's work, carried out by means of photography. Architectural criticism may be a genre of its own already, but you have perhaps opened a new possibility for it.

This reminds me of a phrase used in Japanese architecture circles, a slightly disrespectful name for the pictures certain architectural photographers make: "completion photos." One photograph, or a set of them, saying that this job is finished, and then the photographs go to the client who commissioned the work. That is a "completion photo."

Your photographs, first of all, already refuse to be simple "completion photos." At the same time they offer a fresh visual interpretation from your own standpoint, one that lets many architects feel you have found them out — and, perhaps more important, that helps them see again, visually, what they themselves wanted to pursue and to express in their own buildings. I don't know whether putting it that way means anything to you?

Hélène: Architects need many different ways to express themselves and to communicate, and a photographer can carry on a kind of spatial dialogue with an architect. When I talk about photography I may talk about a lot of things to do with space and with buildings — though it doesn't have to be a building, it could be a cave, a mountain, or the feeling something else around us gives us. That is why I want to photograph landscape too: it lets me say better what I feel about the things other people have built, or about the environment around us.

But I think this part of the work deserves respect as well, and that is why I feel such passion for architectural photography. I will keep at it, and I will keep finding more meaning in my own work.

Gu: Looking at the show, I was astonished by the print quality of every single piece. I asked her whether it was all shot on silver-gelatin film. She said all of it. Someone my age can feel the pull of that. But digital photography is everywhere now, and it has its advantages and its convenience. Will you look at digital again as a way of shooting in your future work?

Hélène: I don't know. Sometimes carrying 20 kilograms of equipment is very hard. I would like a digital way of working too — the traditional way is expensive and heavy. But when I think it through, this is still the way I want to work. I want film, not the computer. Maybe you have 20 sheets of film and that is all you have, 20. That is the way I like it. Somewhere in that, something keeps me focused. It's like performing in front of a lot of people: you show your best self, and you don't let yourself make mistakes. For me that is part of the appeal.

Gu: Silver-gelatin photography suits today's buildings better. Why do I say that? The defining quality of photography in the silver-gelatin era is what we can call its materiality. That materiality comes through the film, through the grain on the print — grain that is really, solidly there on the paper. And silver-gelatin photography matches exactly the concrete and brick that buildings have been made of up to now: put your hand on them and they too have a materiality, a grain. Looking today at the prints she made by hand, I saw the two materialities together — that of the silver-gelatin print and that of modern building materials — and they were made for each other.

In a sense, if you shoot today's buildings, so much of them concrete, stone and brick, with digital photography, you cannot bring out a building's materiality in the true sense. And behind that materiality there is something spiritual.

In that sense, digital may still have its uses. Digital can be used for architectural photography meant to communicate — what kind of building was put up, what it looks like. For that sort of picture digital is entirely up to the job. But as expression, and above all as an artist's personal expression, I think silver-gelatin photography is the best match when the subject is architecture.

Hélène: To some extent I agree with you. But I do think some contemporary buildings can be shot with modern technology. I wouldn't draw a clear line between the traditional way and the modern one. Materials like steel and glass don't really need that depth of expression, that texture. And for contemporary work like that we have plenty of contemporary photographers who can express it in their own way.

Of course we do have different sorts of feelings about different buildings. Sometimes a building needs to be shown in a digital way, and digital can also show something fine and poetic. Photographers can find their own style, their own style of digital photography.

Someone once put it very beautifully: whether the light touches your film or your sensor doesn't matter, what matters is the thing you are photographing, and you need a tool that expresses that object well, that expresses that building well. Film or sensor really isn't the point. What matters is the work you do on the image afterward, which gives us many chances to bring it out.

Exhibition Information

Exhibition title: Hélène Binet: Thirty Years in Dialogue with Light and Shadow

Dates: April 19 – July 21, 2019

Venue: 3rd floor, Power Station of Art, Shanghai

Cover image: Hélène Binet, "Lingering Garden, Suzhou Gardens, China", 2018, digital C-type print, 102×80 cm. Courtesy of the artist.