10 Books on Architecture and Photography

From the Publisher. A visual survey of contemporary artists’ photography of architecture, featuring the work of Andreas Gursky, Iwan Baan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Catherine Opie, Thomas Ruff, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and more.

In 1980 Judith Turner’s book Five Architects was internationally recognized by architects who admired and valued Turner’s unique way of seeing and photographing architecture. This new book contains photographs taken between 1974 and 2009 of buildings designed by 17 well-known architects, including Peter Eisenman, Louis Kahn, Fumihiko Maki, Norman Foster, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Alvar Aalto, Shigeru Ban, and Renzo Piano. From the beginning of her career, Turner has used architecture as subject matter. Ambiguity has always been a hallmark of her work where solids become voids, causing positive and negative to reverse. The photographs are small fragments of architecture taken out of context.

Through her eyes, the subject is decomposed and recreated, assuming a new meaning. The photographs are quiet, yet dynamic, beautifully framed compositions. Architects have commented that she exposes elements of their work they never imagined existed. Thus, while using architecture as subject matter to invent her own worlds, Turner is also revealing some of its inherent complexities.

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Acclaimed Japanese photographer Yoshihiko Ueda embarks upon an introspective pilgrimage to discover the architecture of Mies van der Rohe in this elegant photo book. His passion for the famed Modernist’s work is palpable, as he approaches each subject with loving, almost ritualistic care. Ueda’s camera often focuses on the details: textures and grains, doorknobs and furniture, the natural surroundings, the way the light falls, or overlooked corners and unexpected views. He guides us with a sense of physically moving through the place, glancing around, taking it all in with the repetition and progression of viewpoints. In short, a masterful presentation.

As a prolific photographer for House Beautiful, Better Homes and Gardens, Architectural Digest, and Sunset magazine, Maynard L. Parker (1900–1976) was a pioneer in documenting residential spaces and landscapes for postwar America. His extensively published, sun-kissed brand of photography made him a critical contributor to domestic design culture from the 1940s into the 1960s. Parker’s lens revealed the homes and lifestyles of affluent Americans and celebrities, including Judy Garland, Clark Gable, and Bing Crosby, as well as the interiors, gardens, and built works of Samuel Marx, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thomas Church, and Cliff May, offering an alluring template for living in a new consumer ag

Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream is the first monograph to consider Parker and his work. Lavishly illustrated essays by leading scholars set Parker's photography against the backdrop of an unprecedented demographic shift, the Cold War, and a suburban society increasingly fixated on consumption.

From the Publisher. In Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer Tim Benton reflects on the famous architect’s use of photography, starting with the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s attempts to take professional photographs during his travels in central Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. While Le Corbusier always claimed that he saw no virtue in taking photographs, he actually bought three cameras and took several hundred photographs between 1907 and 1917, many of them of publishable quality. In 1936 he acquired a 16mm movie camera and took 120 sequences of film and nearly 6,000 photographs with it.

This previously unpublished material is the basis for the publication. It reveals Le Corbusier to be a sensitive and brilliant manipulator of a wide range of photographic styles. Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer provides dramatically new insights into Le Corbusier’s visual imagination, his changing attitudes towards nature and materials in the 1930s, and his distrust of progress.

From the Publisher. The renowned architectural photographer shares seven decades’ worth of images of the city he loved, celebrated, and made iconic. With a life and career spanning nearly a century, Julius Shulman is credited with furthering the midcentury modernism movement through his flawless photographs of the pioneering architecture of Richard Neutra and Charles Eames, among others. While Shulman’s pictures comprise the most published images of the modernist movement, this new monograph presents many never-before-seen images on a subject closest to Shulman’s heart: Los Angeles and its environs—including Palm Springs and other suburbs. These affecting photographs show Los Angeles as a living organism, simultaneously vibrant and volatile depending on the neighborhood. This tension is apparent in Shulman’s documentation of then-emerging areas like Century City, Wilshire Boulevard, and Echo Park, as well as his studies of landmarks like the Watts Towers and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Many of the Los Angeles buildings and neighborhoods photographed by Shulman have since been overhauled, torn down, or otherwise altered beyond recognition, making these images some of the only lasting testaments to their existence. Selected from his personal collection as well as his official archives, the photographs included in this book represent not only lesser-known and never-before-seen material, but also some of Shulman’s own personal favorites.

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From the Publisher. I asked architects to send me important images that show the basis of their work. Images that are in their head when they think. Images that show the origin of their architecture. In this book we find 44 individual "musées imaginaires". The most unique architects living today each present up to 10 images to explain the autobiographical roots of their oeuvre. The images are explanations, metaphors, foundations, memories and intentions. They are poetic and philosophical avowals. They reveal a personal perspective on thoughts. They show the roots of architecture and expectations concerning projects. Conscious and unconscious. This book has the format of a reader. As little as possible is said. The images are small, legible and interpretable as icons. As individual collections, they present a personal view of an individual world, while as a whole they provide a universal view of the perceptible origin of contemporary architecture. (Valerio Olgiati).

The list comprises the 44 most unique architects living today: David Adjaye, Francisco Aires Mateus, Manuel Aires Mateus, Alejandro Aravena, Ben van Berkel, Mario Botta, Alberto Campo Baeza, Adam Caruso, Peter St John, David Chipperfield, Preston Scott Cohen, Hermann Czech, Roger Diener, Peter Eisenman, Sou Fujimoto, Antón Garcia-Abril, Go Hasegawa, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Steven Holl, Anne Holtrop, Junya Ishigami, Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito, Bijoy Jain (Studio Mumbai), Momoyo Kaijima, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Atelier Bow-Wow), Christian Kerez, Hans Kollhoff, Winy Maas (MVRDV), Peter Märkli, Jürgen Mayer H., Richard Meier, Glenn Murcutt, Ryue Nishizawa, Valerio Olgiati, John Pawson, Cecilia Puga, Smiljan Radic, Richard Rogers, Kazuyo Sejima, Jonathan Sergison, Stephen Bates, Miroslav Šik, Alvaro Siza Vieira, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Peter Wilson (Bolles + Wilson), Peter Zumthor.

From the Publisher. Architecture has always been a magnificent and much debated platform to express the spirit of the times, world views, everyday life, and aesthetics. It is a daring materialisation of private and public visions, of applied art and the avant-garde alike. Concrete: Photography and Architecture presents images of iconic urban architectures and townscapes that reflect the close and complex union between photography and architecture, between architect and photographer. Starting from the 19th century, when photography was invented, the book picks up positions, juxtapositions, and thematic fields that bring together the concrete, fundamental, and the historic. Besides everyday architecture and glamorous buildings, it looks also at structural horizontal and vertical axes; houses and homes; utopias, plans and reality; the captivating transience of architecture against the test of time; and destruction both natural and intentional.

From the Publisher. Limited edition of the only monograph on the work of Hélène Binet, the contemporary photographer of choice for today’s major architects. This book is an elegant overview of Binet’s career, bringing together black-and-white and color work. It is divided into thematic sections, each highlighting specific architects and designers as well as a particular aspect of their work that Binet’s dramatic photographs draw out and present. Interludes of more personal work, primarily abstract landscapes, show a different aspect of Binet’s work. Accompanying texts and conversations will highlight the ideas that inform Binet’s work, including abstraction, the importance of materiality and light, the experience of space, and the emotional power of architecture.

From the Publisher. For a relatively young country, America is rich in decaying ruins that cover its landscape. Through his striking photography, Eric Holubow provides a glimpse inside these perilous structures to reveal the slow but unforgiving wear and tear that has befallen many of the country’s forgotten sites. What transpires is a surprising, yet undeniable beauty beneath the rubble and decrepitude. Centered in the Rust Belt, but spanning from coast to coast, north to south, and big cities to small towns, breathtaking images of nearly a hundred sites, including factories, churches, theaters, prisons, and power plants, signify the comprehensive erosion of important parts of our history. Holubow’s compelling work forces us to pay attention to formerly grand, significant landmarks and institutions that have long been ignored, and reminds us of the tragic fate that they and everything we know eventually share.