AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Black-and-white photographs of modern American buildings, from the Guggenheim Museum to the TWA Terminal
- Worked in
- Black and white, mostly; some color, including interiors
- Camera
- Large-format view camera, such as an 8x10 Sinar
- Also
- First AIA medal for architectural photography (1961); founder of the agency Esto (1966)
- Start with
- Ezra Stoller: A Photographic History of Modern American Architecture (Phaidon, 2019)
- Links
Ezra Stoller (1915–2004) was an American photographer whose clear black-and-white pictures shaped how the world saw modern architecture. He photographed buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn, and in 1961 he became the first to receive the American Institute of Architects medal for architectural photography.
The story
In 1959, the year Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum opened in New York, Ezra Stoller came to photograph it. Wright had built the museum as one long ramp that winds around an open center. The obvious picture was from the top, looking down into the gallery below. Stoller did not climb up. He looked up instead. In his photograph the ramps lose their depth and become flat rings around the skylight. The New York Times later compared the shape to a chambered nautilus.
Choices like this came from years of looking at buildings. Born in Chicago in 1915, Stoller grew up in New York. His father was a tailor and his mother a needleworker, and the family came from Poland. At New York University he photographed models and drawings for friends’ portfolios. He graduated in 1938 with a degree in industrial design. That same year he married Helen Rubin, an art student, and she gave him a book on Eugène Atget. He was largely self-taught. “For getting a sense of space, there’s nobody like Atget,” he once told an interviewer.
Wright noticed him early. From 1945 Stoller photographed Taliesin in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona, and in 1947 his Wright pictures were shown at the Museum of Modern Art. Wright even asked him to become the official photographer of Taliesin. He said no.
But speed was never his way. Before a shoot he walked through a building for a full day and followed the sun. Then he drew a plan with arrows, times and notes on the light. Eight pictures in a day was good work. His daughter Erica remembers waiting with him at One Chase Manhattan Plaza. “You see, in 20 minutes the sunlight is going to move between those two buildings,” he told her.
So architects started to want their buildings “Stollerized,” a word coined by Philip Johnson. In 1962 he photographed Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at Idlewild Airport, the year it opened. Four years later he founded the agency Esto.
Looking up inside the Guggenheim was not a way to show off. It was a way to let Wright’s spiral speak. “I never claimed that my work is art,” he said. “The art is the architecture.”
The work
- 1915Born in Chicago on May 16; grows up in New York
- 1938Graduates from New York University in industrial design
- 1939Photographs Alvar Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair
- 1942Drafted; teaches photography at the Army Signal Corps Photo Center
- 1945Begins photographing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and Taliesin West
- 1947His Wright photographs are shown at the Museum of Modern Art
- 1961First recipient of the AIA medal for architectural photography
- 1966Founds the photo agency Esto
- 2004Dies on October 29 in Williamstown, Massachusetts
Lessons
Look where others don’t. At the Guggenheim he skipped the easy view from the top and pointed the camera up. The building became a new shape.
Plan with the sun. He walked a building for a day before shooting and made a plan with arrows and times. Most of the work was done before the camera came out.
Make fewer pictures. Eight photographs in a day was a good day for him. Each one was waited for.
Try this: choose one building near you. Visit it at morning, noon and late afternoon on the same day without taking pictures. Draw a simple plan with arrows and the times when the light looks best. Then come back and make no more than eight photographs.
Gear
Stoller worked with a large-format camera and shot almost only in black and white.
8x10 view camera: for one of his Guggenheim interiors, a Famous Photographers School lesson lists an 8x10 Sinar, a 6½-inch lens, 1/2 second at f/32, and only the light already in the building.
For color interiors he blocked daylight with black fabric and balanced the building’s own lamps, sometimes making two exposures on one sheet of film. On family trips the equipment filled eight or ten big silver cases on the car roof.
Books
Ezra Stoller: A Photographic History of Modern American Architecture (Phaidon, 2019). Written by the architect Pierluigi Serraino, who spent three years on it and was the first author given full access to the Stoller archive. The 416 pages hold 450 images, many never published before, in black and white and color. Four chronological sections each open with a chapter of his life story, followed by a portfolio. Designed by Pentagram with Erica Stoller. The fullest look at his five decades of work, and the best place to start.
Ezra Stoller, Photographer (Yale University Press, 2012). A 288-page survey with texts by Nina Rappaport, Erica Stoller, Andy Grundberg, Akiko Busch and John Morris Dixon. Next to famous buildings like Fallingwater, the Seagram Building and the TWA Terminal, it shows a less known side: his pictures of factories and American workers in the 1950s and 1960s, and a section on houses. Good for readers who want to see more than the classic icons.
Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller (Harry N. Abrams, 1999). A large 228-page book with more than 400 photographs in black and white, duotone and color. The commentary is by William S. Saunders of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, with notes by Stoller himself on his subjects and technique. Buildings by Wright, Breuer, Mies, Gropius, Kahn, Rudolph, Pei and Meier. A classic for architecture lovers.
The TWA Terminal (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999). Part of the Building Block series, small cloth-bound books that each show one modern building through one photographer. Stoller’s duotone photographs were made just after the terminal was finished, so they also show the people, fashions and furniture of the time. A short history and newly drawn plans are included, and Stoller’s preface tells how he worked with the architect and photographed the building. Other volumes he made cover Fallingwater, the Seagram Building, the Salk Institute and more.
In his words
“While I cannot make a bad building good, I can draw out the strengths in a work that has strength.”
“I see my work in a way that is analogous to a musician given a score to play who must bring it to life.”
