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HÉLÈNE BINET understands that a building is made as much of light and shadow as it is concrete or brick. She is in accord with one of her long-term clients, Daniel Libeskind, the architect who encouraged her early career as an architectural photographer. ‘Light is the most important building material,’ he said. ‘
...Great architecture is really a showcase of light and shadow.’
She is sensitive to the mutability of
structures that results in, the way that form and surface texture shift according to the light of a building’s location or season or time of day. ‘Of course a building is there all the time when it’s winter, when it’s spring, so every building has an incredible story of light on its own skin and inside,’ she told Dezeen. ‘I cover as much as is possible, but I cannot cover completely this story.’
Binet believes that buildings are at their
best according to particular qualities of light. She likes to study the site to determine the optimum moment to capture it. ‘The best thing is to spend time before looking at a building. Of course I can’t always control the weather – sometimes I think I really want to do this with cloud and then we have sun, or the opposite. The more time I have to spend
and understand the light of the place, the more successful [the shot will be].’ For more than 25 years, London-based,
Swiss-French Binet has recorded both contemporary and historical architecture and built a formidable reputation as photographer to the starchitects. Her regular clients include Libeskind, Caruso St John, Studio Mumbai, Peter Zumthor and, until her untimely death, Zaha Hadid. She has also photographed the works of past architects such as Alvar Aalto, Geoffrey Bawa, Le Corbusier, Sverre Fehn, John Hejduk, Sigurd Lewerentz, Andrea Palladio and Dimitris Pikionis.
Binet studied photography at the
Instituto Europeo di Design in Rome, where she grew up, subsequently working as a photographer at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, where she photographed theatrical performances for two years. That theatricality remains in her work. ‘I think this experience of having, let’s say, the dancer or the character of the opera coming out of the dark was for me something always important,’ she said in a Phaidon interview. ‘So there was always a strong desire to put some kind of theatricality into the piece. This is where I fell in love with the world of shadows and light.’
LIGHT + TECH
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
A new Royal Academy exhibition showcases the work of architectural photographer Hélène Binet, whose images explore the interplay between light and shade
ALL IMAGES: HÉLÈNE BINET
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