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November 18, 2004
Renowned architectural photographer Ezra
Stoller died on October 29 at his home in Williamstown, Mass.,
at the age of 89 from complications due to a stroke.
Attending architecture school at New
York University as Modernism took hold in the 1930s, Stoller
came along just at the right time to become one of the pre-eminent
pioneers of Modernist architectural photography. By 1939,
he shot the New York World's Fair, creating images that, as
in many of his pictures, now commemorate the buildings and
even define them in our mind's eye. During an active career
that would last until the early 1980s, he photographed many
of the remarkable new inventions of the post-War era.
It took a Modernist eye to see Modernist
buildings, and Stoller framed views that, in their limpid
transparency, always clarified the structures. He did not
simply document a building. According to his daughter, Erica
Stoller, who runs ESTO, the architectural photo agency her
father established in 1966, he said that he didn’t just
“take” photographs but “made” them. Using
a highly laborious process that involved a car laden with
suitcases and ladders, he strategized shoots by mapping views
on plans and stalking buildings for optimal sun angles and
shadows.
The images often provide the lasting
record of a building understood in the way the architect intended,
revealed in a chiaroscuro of light and shade that explained
its form, spatiality and sensibility. In a way his aesthetic
of crisp delineation, often achieved through the sculpting
effects of natural light, provoked architects to design for
the same effects, so that he affected the designs that he
would capture. Great architects-Eero Saarinen, Paul Rudolph,
Louis Kahn, Mies van der Rohe, Richard Meier-regularly sought
out his services. Asked to advise how Stoller should shoot
one of his buildings, Frank Lloyd Wright said not to worry,
“Ezra will know.”
Joseph Giovannini
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