AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Close, quiet photographs of light, shadow and texture in buildings by Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Zumthor and Le Corbusier
- Works in
- Mostly black and white, with more color in recent years; film only, never digital
- Camera
- Arca Swiss 4x5 large-format camera
- Also
- Hand-prints in her London darkroom; Ada Louise Huxtable Prize (2019); solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts (2021)
- Start with
- Hélène Binet (Lund Humphries, 2024)
- Links
Hélène Binet (born 1959) is a Swiss-French photographer based in London. For about forty years she has photographed contemporary and historic architecture, from buildings by Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Peter Zumthor to the work of Le Corbusier and Palladio. She works only with film and is known for close, quiet images of light, shadow and texture.
The story
In 1996 Hélène Binet flew to Berlin. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, his first building, was still under construction. Nobody had sent her. She had, as Libeskind later wrote, “no commission and no funding.” Her pictures caught the cuts and empty spaces of the building, which speak of Jewish history in Germany. A year later they became a small book, A Passage Through Silence and Light.
Architecture had not been the plan. Born in Sorengo, Switzerland, in 1959, she grew up in Rome and in Sperlonga, a fishing village on the coast. She studied photography in Rome, hoping to work with performance, and spent two years photographing shows at the Grand Théâtre de Genève. But her husband, the architect Raoul Bunschoten, had studied with Libeskind. In the early 1980s Libeskind met her and encouraged her to make photography her career.
In the mid-1980s she came to London, where Bunschoten taught at the Architectural Association. Its director, Alvin Boyarsky, loved photography and books. She had never photographed a building, yet he asked her to work on an architecture book with him. “And since then, that’s what I did!” she said.
Many of the architects she met in those years became famous, and her work grew with theirs. She has photographed Zaha Hadid’s buildings since the first one, the Vitra Fire Station. With Peter Zumthor she worked for years. He “taught me a lot about the environment in which a building is placed,” she says. In her picture of his Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, the camera looks up through dark walls toward a single opening of light.
To photograph Le Corbusier’s monastery of La Tourette in France had “always been a dream.” She first worked there in 2002, on the theme of shadow and light. In 2007 she made this color image of its Canons de Lumière, or “light cannons.”
She still works slowly, on film, with a large camera, and she rarely shows a whole building. A fragment, she believes, leaves room for the viewer to imagine the rest. The young woman who wanted to photograph the stage never really left it. “When I am working with a building, there’s the feeling that it’s a continuous performance,” she says.
The work
- 1959Born in Sorengo, Switzerland, to Swiss and French parents
- 1993Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station is completed; Binet photographs it soon after
- 1996Flies to Berlin to photograph Libeskind’s Jewish Museum under construction
- 1997Publishes A Passage Through Silence and Light (Black Dog)
- 2007Made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects
- 2015Receives the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award
- 2019Wins the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize; solo show at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai
- 2021Light Lines, solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London
- 2024Lund Humphries publishes her complete monograph
Lessons
Go before you are asked. She photographed the Jewish Museum in Berlin while it was still being built, with no commission and no money.
Show a fragment. She prefers a detail to the whole building. What you leave out, the viewer can imagine.
Go back again. A good project, she says, needs at least two visits. She prints, looks at what works, and returns.
Try this: pick one building near you. Photograph only one small part of it, a corner, a step or a shadow, at three different times of day. Compare the frames, then go back once more.
Gear
Binet has always worked with film and has never worked professionally with digital.
Large-format camera: she usually works with an Arca Swiss 4x5 camera. Its bellows and movable lens give her control over perspective and depth of field, and the large sheets of film hold fine detail.
Black-and-white film: most of her work is in black and white. She says “you can hear more in the darkness.” In recent years she uses color more often.
Darkroom: she hand-prints many of her photographs in her studio in north London.
Books
Hélène Binet (Lund Humphries, 2024). The complete monograph, and the first book in the publisher’s Architectural Photographer series. It has more than 170 photographs and two long essays based on interviews with her. Marco Iuliano, of the Liverpool School of Architecture, writes about her life, from Sperlonga and Rome to the Architectural Association. Martino Stierli, chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA, places her work within the history of architectural photography. The plates are grouped by themes such as Traces, Passage of Light, Sequence and Abstraction. The best place to start if you want to see her whole career.
Light Lines: The Architectural Photographs of Hélène Binet (Royal Academy of Arts, 2021). Published for her solo exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, 2021 to 2022. About ninety photographs, from Nicholas Hawksmoor’s London churches and the Jantar Mantar Observatory in Jaipur to buildings by Le Corbusier, Peter Zumthor, John Hejduk, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid. It includes an essay by the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and a conversation between Binet and the curator Vicky Richardson. A compact book of 110 pages, good for anyone who missed the show.
A Passage Through Silence and Light (Black Dog Publishing, 1997). A small, 44-page book of her photographs of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum extension to the Berlin Museum, with text by Raoul Bunschoten. She made the pictures in 1996, while the building was still under construction. An early work, and a rare chance to see the museum before it opened. For readers interested in Libeskind and in how her style began.
In her words
“I think photography is about celebrating an instant.”
“The film is a real testimony, and you’re using the difficulty to make a good image.”
