DINZ德网 | 赫莱娜 比奈特 · 光的哲学家

For 40 years, Binet has photographed both contemporary and historical architecture, collaborating with influential architects such as Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Peter Zumthor. Arguably the world's pre-eminent female architecture photographer, her work has been published in several books, exhibited around the world and awarded global prizes. She is known for shooting exclusively on film and mostly in black-and-white, even as digital photography has become dominant over the course of her career.

Though she finds much contemporary architecture photography "technically amazing", Binet feels the images often lack something important. "They're so perfect that you don't enter them – you're outside," "Architects used to be really interested in having artists working on their projects and wanted a strong interpretation [of their work]," she continued. "Now most of the images look the same. I cannot say, 'this is the photograph of this person'. Before, you could recognise the style and now, no."

For Binet, this shift in priorities is something to be lamented. "Why is there this flattening-off?" she asked. "What is the need? Of course, it's social media and everything but I really don't know about all this need for fast consumption." "Architects didn't have a bigger budget [back then], but they thought this [an artist's interpretation] was important," she added. "Maybe it is to do with the quickness? I mean, we spend less time looking. But I find it quite concerning." The counter to the rise of social media and shortening turnaround times is, according to Binet, "to keep your eye fresh". 

"You have to be able to go and see a building almost like it's the first thing you've seen in your life," she explained. "Taking a photograph is an opportunity to rediscover something, to see something that most of the time you don't see – because you think you already know it, or you have never taken the time to look at it." 

Born in Switzerland, Binet began her career after studying at the Architectural Association (AA) in London during the 1980s. Her formative influence was Hungarian photographer Lucien Hervé, who, she said, demonstrated to her that within capturing buildings "there is a profession, but also a field where I can explore and be an artist". "Hervé's images were around me from very young – his books and the photographs he did with Le Corbusier – his work is deeply part of me and the reason I started to love black-and-white photography," said Binet.

Besides Hervé, Binet is keen to stress that "very early on, there were very strong women photographers – not as many as men – but if you compare to other disciplines, there's been a lot of women photographers that did very well early on, and that managed to make an artist's life and pay the bills". 

She cites early- and mid-20th century photographers like Tina Modotti, Lee Miller, Berenice Abbott and Lucia Moholy.These women, several of whom were still working when Binet was starting out in the 1980s, provided reassurance that meant Binet remained undaunted at the prospect of being a woman photographing architecture.

"I never felt alone in that sense," she said. "It was not like for an architect or conductor, or some of those professions where it really took so long to accept women.

"Binet also cites the influence of the work of more recent photographers like Judith Turner, but she is most enthusiastic about the Bauhaus photographers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Peterhans, Lucia Moholy and Erich Consemüller.

"They were like my masters," she said. "I love them for teaching me everything about photography: how we can look at or photograph objects by looking at them from every point of view, that photography is an independent art, and how we can put life into objects and transform them.""The sense of freedom really inspired me and guided me for many years."Much of Binet's work, including her photos of the Pantheon or Andrea Palladio's Italian villas, focuses on close-up details of buildings, allowing gaps for the viewer to imagine the in-between.

She describes this approach as a "dismantling" of the subject."Especially with historical buildings, dismantling has definitely been part of the work I've done early on," she said. "You discover a building by dismantling it."

"For me, what is very important is that I show things, but I also let you imagine what you don't see. If I just show half of a curve, then you start to say 'what is it, and why is it there?”

She uses a musical analogy to explain her philosophy. "I respect the score, I want to know the period, but I play the tune. It's my interpretation.

"One of the pivotal moments in Binet's career was her collaboration with Swiss architect Zumthor, who she says "taught me a lot about the environment in which a building is placed". "He is so careful about it, has such an understanding, and deep love for the site – he would use nature, the plants, so bit by bit by working with him, I started to appreciate this more," she recalled.

For her part, Binet says she has often preferred to work in black-and-white because "you can hear more in the darkness"."In the beginning, I used lots of black-and-white to create that abstraction that allows these questions more," she explained.

"For this project in 2002, I was invited to do something on this theme and I thought 'where would I found the most rich articulation of different types of shadows?' And it was at a monastery, of course, because you have also the function: the spiritual, the practical, the social.

"To be able to photograph a building of that beauty by Le Corbusier had always been a dream. So it was a big day – and I chose quite a 'dry' space, thinking 'let's see what are the shadows that take you to a corridor or a staircase'. Spaces where you are between two functions, that take you to the spiritual place.

"In this image, you can play with interpretation because shadows can be a source of knowledge, but they are also an absence of energy, which is not to say silent."

"The Pantheon was right at the beginning of my career so I feel sometimes very shy to talk about it," Binet said. "This image is about the desire to look at something that is very well known, but often not in an intimate way.

"I wanted to explore the possibility of dismantling – and being in a very personal dialogue with – something that you think you know. "It is a building that makes light, with its oculus. Its design has a perfect sphere within a cylinder, where you can only imagine the full extent of the sphere and not completely seize it. So my work in my pictures is to support that idea of something you can only imagine, which is a very nice challenge. "

This triptych of photographs was taken at Peter Zumthor's celebrated thermal baths in Vals, Switzerland, Each photo is a perfect translation of the architect's unique sensibility to introduce light as an architectural material, which also explains the photogenic quality of his buildings, in the literal sense of the word. But beyond that, it is significant that Binet thinks of these images in terms of a sequence, which seemingly runs counter to the notion of the singularity of the image. The Vals triptych is the perfect demonstration that the singular presence and plurality of the image are not mutually exclusive, but rather enhance each other.

A series of photos of fog formations in the Chilean Atacama desert is perhaps Binet's most radical departure from conventional architectural photography," Stierli said.This photo explores architecture as only a small episode in the inevitable processes of the formation and dissolution of material aggregates.Binet understands architecture as part of a larger material ecology, and as an attempt to bridge the divide between the spheres of culture and nature: the human-made artefact is seen in the context of natural processes and of the emergence and dispersal, of formation and entropy; a commentary on architecture's – in the end futile – aspiration to transcend time.

Published for the first time, this intersection of stairs in the coastal town of Sperlonga is an early example of the theme of  'ground' in Binet's work. A theme that I think traverses all the sections is the ground. In her work, Hélène is particularly interested in giving viewers the opportunity to reflect, not only on architecture but, on our relationship with the planet as human beings.

Dimitris Pikionis' pathway leading to the Parthenon in Athens is perhaps Binet's most well-known and paradigmatic photograph. "he ground plays a fundamental role in Binet's work, and I found it compelling that, to capture in a single image the tactile and textured presence of tectonic form, both in built and natural environments.

Zumthor occupies a position of particular significance in Binet's career and her collaboration with the architect has produced some of the most compelling photographs in her oeuvre.

Both Binet and Zumthor are deeply invested in a phenomenological understanding of architecture. The photography is courtesy of Hélène Binet, unless otherwise stated.

"I respect the score, I want to know the period, but I play the tune," says Binet of her philosophy. "Now I love colour, but in the beginning it was really that desire to not say too much, to let you have space [to imagine]. I am using colour more now and reaching for where colour can be controlled."

"In 2018, I decided to photograph gardens that I had visited before and thought there's great potential there," Binet said."

Those gardens have very specific walls – the way they are somehow peeling in and out, and their relationship with the city.

"I didn't expect to find this micro-world on the wall; the moss and the lichen, which create this landscape. The wall is very pictorial, the way the growth is moving through the surface reminds me of Chinese paintings."You see the elements; water, wind, earth – it's quite intense, on just one surface. And so I made the pictures in colour to keep the sense of life."At the Classical Gardens of Suzhou, in the Jiangsu province of China, surface transforms into space; walls become landscapes.

“While the gardens themselves are lush and extensively landscaped, Binet pauses on modest corners and walls, against which stand bare trees and lone branches. The pale backdrops are streaked with time, moss, accumulated grime, which through Binet’s lens resembles painted canvas – the elegant smudge of a Gerhard Richter or the wilting smear of a Cy Twombly. … in Hélène Binet’s work there is a sense of the theatrical or the orchestrated: she moves the lines and angels to where she wants them, waits for the main players – shadow and light – to emerge and fall into place, ready for their close-ups.” (Emily LaBarge, esse.ca).

In her journey through this UNESCO World Heritage Site, Hélène captures the traces of environmental influences on built structures.

Her impressive series of photography shows how weather and time have turned blank walls into vivid depictions of nature. In Binet’s images, architecture becomes the frame for imaginary landscapes. By interweaving foreground and background, the artist tells stories that shift between the two dimensions of the plane and the three dimensions of space.

“I decided to create a dialogue between these works because both of them are reflections of the unseen. The Suzhou gardens are a micro-world with clear boundaries: the walls. They create a series of infinite images and reflections of landscapes of how people looked at the nature thousand years ago,” she said.

By standing in front of the walls during the day and studying the history of the gardens at night, Binet draws the viewers’ attention to a time and place of leaves shimmering among windowsills, water glittering in the pond, while moss grows on the walls.“Those were the intensive days when I felt like a peasant working in the field from the first ray of morning till evening twilight,” Binet recalled. “It is a delicate nature, and I feel a sense of freedom.”

Binet's background, from her childhood in the Italian fishing village of Sperlonga and then in Rome, through her early discovery of Hervé, to other significant influences and collaborations with global architecture stars. "Binet's oeuvre seems to oscillate between two obsessions: a desire to translate spatial phenomena into the two-dimensional space of the image and a quest to articulate the modulation of light on a surface," co-author Martino Stierli argues in one of the chapters.

MoMA curator Stierli and titled Positioning Binet, explores how Binet's oeuvre "oscillates between two obsessions: a desire to translate spatial phenomena into two-dimensional images and a quest to articulate the modulation of light on a surface".

Binet was asked to photograph a selection of early ecclesiastical buildings by Böhm to celebrate his 100th birthday in 2020," Binet. "I had a great amount of freedom, because if you work for somebody that is 100 years old, he doesn't think about his future career or anything – you can just celebrate the work.

"I've always been fascinated by the different life that concrete can have, and the formation of this material can feel so soft or strong or heavy or overwhelming, or human and unhuman – it's everything. But also Böhm gave it a sense of great freedom." I think the concrete is treated very differently: sometimes it's rather masculine and strong, and in other moments it's so delicate that you don't know if you're looking at origami or concrete. I like that." I like that feeling that, especially in churches, you're going to be surprised and you're going to have to find your own space inside the church through that freedom or use of the concrete, which is somehow a liberation because it is a sacred place, but it's not, doesn't tell you what you have to believe. It tells you you have to be spirit

Achieving that combination requires, in Binet's words, "patience and strength". "A good project needs at least two visits to the same place," she considered. "There's no magic – the weather and the light etcetera – but you start [with the visit], you print, you look to see if it does or doesn't work."

"You should never be really satisfied," she added. "I always think when I'm done – that's when I'm actually starting to work.

"Binet's advice to the future generation of architecture photographers is "to trust in [yourself]"."Your 20s and early 30s are such a creative moment and if I look at my work, and a lot of work of amazing photographers, the early work is the best," she said."You might not have all the technical skills, but this early work is so precious. Trust and push. Do whatever you have to do to stay in touch with yourself. Don't look too much [at other photography]." "Trust your energy when you're young – it's a very special energy. You have inside you a very powerful moment. Trust and go for it. Be confident!"