Ezra Stoller
One of my favorite Architectural Photographers is Ezra Stoller (1915-2004). He was born in Chicago. His interest in photography began while he was an architecture student at New York University, when he began making lantern slides and photographs of architectural models, drawings and sculpture. After his graduation in 1939, he concentrated on photography. His work featured landmarks of modern architecture, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, Alvar Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Stoller is often cited in aiding the spread of the Modern Movement. In 1961, he was the first recipient of the AIA Gold Medal for Photography. Stoller’s photographs were featured in the book Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller. In his later years, Stoller founded Esto Photographics, a commercial photography firm currently directed by his daughter Erica Stoller.”I see my work in a way that is analogous to a musician given a score to play who must bring it to life and make the piece as good as it can be,” said Mr. Stoller, in an interview quoted in a brochure about a current show of his work at the Williams College Museum of Art. ”While I cannot make a bad building good, I can draw out the strengths in a work that has strength.”
Shooting primarily in black and white and using a large-format camera, Mr. Stoller laid meticulous groundwork, often spending days watching the light move across the surface of a building before he ever clicked the shutter. ”He would almost ‘stalk’ the building and approach it from every angle and make all these diagrams,” said Deborah Rothschild, the curator of ”Ezra Stoller: Architectural Photography,” on view at Williams through Dec. 19. ”That, combined with a natural gift for composition and clarity, enabled him to get just the right vantage point.” His black and white images were such a reference in the field that Frank Lloyd Wright had proposed that he worked exclusively for him, which Stoller declined as he went on to create his own agency.
He died in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on 29 October 2004, from complications of a stroke.
Check out these links to additional famous Architectural Photographers:
Three famous Architectural Photographers who are still with us areTimothy Hursley from Little Rock Arkansas,Norman McGrathfrom New York and Klaus Kinold from Munich Germany.
Another favorite no longer with us is Julius Shulman.
