Inhabiting the Micro-landscape | Hélène Binet
Photo Hélène Binet, Gottfried Bohm, Five churches, Germany, 2020
Written by Luxi H.
As a writer of architectural photography, my work entails going over the oeuvre of contemporary architecture photographers. Some of their work has a visual urgency that requires to be immediately distilled in another format, to be soothed and discussed by words. Some of them, the elder-felt images in the category, lay peacefully, tranquil. Silence, or an underground echo that swirls in the hollowing of stones are the tones the photographs register. If not for chances, the copy of Hélène Binet’s The Walls of Suzhou Gardens, A Photography Journey, an aged copy I had for years with a serious, plain blue cover that resembles the unvisited anthology at a university library, would continue lying on the shelf for years, merge with the stone walls pale and fragile of my old apartment building.
Photo Hélène Binet, The Walls of Suzhou Garden, China
Walls, the watery-smooth walls of Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum in Cologne, the concrete walls with a fauvist, bestial imprint of Ponte Sul Basento, the walls with a binary matrix’s rhythmic pattern in the early ecclesiastical buildings of Gottfried Böhm, the surrealist walls of Zaha Hadid that feel directly out of vectorgraphs, Hélène Binet’s photographs are primarily about walls. Heavy, sturdy, substantial, wordless, and a usual myth for arts comes out of it. It has been hard and remains hard to define whether it is the subject matter has commanded the right methodology, or the photographic methodology, a metamorphic expression of the photographer, will gradually land on the proper subject matter.
Photo Hélène Binet, Sergio Musmeci, Ponte sul Basento, Potenza, Italy, 2015
Like the walls she photographed, Hélène Binet’s method is old and serious. Being one of the few rare photographers in the trade who still use analogue, Hélène Binet has devoted herself to the outdated hard labor of photograph-making: the large-format camera, the expensive film, the tripod that has to be carried to the remote sites of architecture, and the thin moment of shutter that may introduce the error of exposure and focus. Resonating with the laborious construction process, Binet’s photographs are hard-won out of long contemplation and physical endeavor.
Photo Hélène Binet, Zaha Hadid, Landesgartenschau / Landscape Formation One, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1999
Composing Space
In 2012, Hélène Binet gave a lecture at Harvard University, graduate school of design. The title she has chosen for the seminal lecture, which remains highly summarizing of her architecture photography, was “composing space”. Composing, the highly musical, poetical and visual process is where the sense of a space is born. Binet does not see space as an apriori entity that is naturally given existence. A blank wall, a flat window, a homogeneous ground, these undifferentiated gazes and uncritical expressions are simply not the visual fields where space is enlightened. It takes tremendous effort of an architect to give an architecture the spatial elements that are necessary to create a space, and, as it naturally goes, when the spatial elements are handed over to the architecture photographer, it also requires an attentive composing process to express the poetic space endowed in the field, to translate it into a language of light and shadow.
Photo Hélène Binet, Peter Zumthor, Spittelhof Estate, Biel-Benken, Baselland, 2008
Hélène Binet’s lens follows the direction on the wall, or is attracted by the weight of the granite, the rocks, the concrete, the substantial and archaic materials that have made the wall. And many of the architectures, Hélène Binet has chosen to photograph them with a sharp, crisp and unrelenting geometry of a thin paper sculpture. It invokes a solemn physical law, it evokes a grave history. Very faintly, we feel this is the composing principle of Binet, the principle that gives her imagery a gravity.
Photo Hélène Binet, Lunuganga Estate, Bentota, Sri Lanka, - Photographs 2002
Micro-landscape
It is either architectural photography is an ambiguous genre, or architecture, as it is very vaguely defined, is more frequently experienced rather than thought about. But architectural photography is a highly paradoxical genre, and it is situated in the complicated history of human’s endeavor of experiencing and creating space, of manifesting and realizing the ambition of building. The paradox lies as such: one can either be inside an architecture and experience it partially, or one can be outside an architecture and know it completely. There isn’t a perfect balance of completely, immersively experiencing the architecture. Architecture photography has inherited this central paradox, and Hélène Binet’s response to it has been radically hermeneutic, to the extent that her images oftentimes induce in the fresh eyes a confusion and surprise.
Photo Hélène Binet, Jørn Utzon, Can Lis, Majorca,2019
If we mark the innate paradox of architectural photography as the central locale, then most artists in this genre create zoomed-out images that show the architecture in its wider, environmental context. As opposed to the more common zooming-out, Binet’s works are a radical zoom-in, so close that the large-format camera almost touches the wall, and so close that the overall structure of an architecture becomes invisible. Here, architecture seems irrelevant, or is only relevant in an indirect sense as the grand cosmological background is relevant to the breath of a snail. The lens, to its own comfort and satisfaction, captures the minute texture on the wall, the infinitesimal crack, roughness, stains, holes, shadows, and waves of the material.
Photo Hélène Binet-Vals Triptych A-#59_Peter Zumthor, Therme Vals
Within the architecture’s macro-landscape, Hélène Binet has endowed an attentiveness to the micro-landscape, to the small sensual cocoons from which we feel, we become intimate with the architecture. In Binet’s photographs, there’s a carefulness to the architecture, and a zen peacefulness that allows for the carefulness to the small details against grand background.
Photo Hélène Binet, Jantar Mantar Observatory, Jaipur, India, 1734, photographs from 2002
Back to the central paradox of architecture, it is one of the many occasions where hermeneutics is seen in contrast with cognitivism, a wider paradox that marked human existence. Architecture, from its very beginning, has always been devoted to expressing the condition of our existence through purely physical materials and geometrical principles, and through this expression, we confirm our humanitarian dignity. If the first architecture known to us, the un-accomplished Tower of Babel, is the dignity expressed through the ambition of building macro-landscape, then millenniums later, when the shape of the tower finds its echo in Hélène Binet’s photograph of the wall of Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, humanitarian dignity also finds itself inhabiting in the micro-landscape.
Photo Hélène Binet, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Wachendorf, Germany, 2009
