Left Light enters through the open roof of the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel in Wachendorf, Germany, photographed by Binet in 2009


LIGHT + TECH 119


Binet came to live in London in the


1980s when her husband, architect Raoul Bunschote, founder of Chora, was teaching at the Architecture Association. Alvin Boyarsky, director of the AA, gave her an opportunity to photograph her first architecture book and this set her on her career path. Binet’s work has appeared in a wide range of books (including Composing Space, a Phaidon monograph, published in 2012) and featured in both national and international exhibitions, including in the permanent collection of MoMA, New York. RIBA made her an honorary fellow in 2007, and she was awarded the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award in 2015. She is also one of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hundred Heroines. In a digital age when we rely not only on the fusillade approach to photography – sheer quantity virtually guaranteeing a successful outcome – but also the ability to finesse an image on a computer, Binet is painstaking, a purist and perfectionist. She famously works exclusively with film, taking her time, savouring the moment. ‘Photography is about celebrating that instant, the moment the shutter clicks,’ she says. ‘It tells us something about the world. You have to give the best of yourself in that instant, there’s no going back. Photoshop is the big enemy. ‘This way of working is much more suitable to my deep nature. My talent suits a slow way of working, more meditative.’ Her characteristic approach is to make


the complex simple, often focusing on just a fragment of a building. It is a form of humility, an acknowledgement that capturing the entirety is impossible. ‘It is a reaction to the possibility that as photographers we have to do a lot, and I do the opposite and say no we can’t. It’s about seeing very little, it’s about reducing to one moment. That moment can tell you a lot. When you look at it, you make your own space with your own imagination, like when we read, when we dream. That’s the spatial quality that I’m looking at.’ Her work is predominantly


monochromatic, the black-and-white images underlining the dramatic juxtaposition of light and shadow. It is a key reason she insists on a film rather than digital camera. ‘You get a different quality of light and shadow, film is more sensitive, film is more spontaneous,’ says Binet. ‘Black and white will tell you more about how something reacts to light. We cannot see a building or a material without light, we are not able to understand the quality of it without light. We put an object inside a beam of light and then we understand it. It’s very complex.’ The RA exhibition is organised


thematically, exploring connections between ideas, places and landscape. It begins with


2


1


one of Binet’s most celebrated images, Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station, completed in 1993 and photographed soon after. Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery in France is featured, as well as the Jantar Mantar Observatory in Jaipur, India, a gift for Binet with its high contrast light and shadow. Binet’s long-standing professional


relationship with Hadid continues in the next section with images of the MAXXI Museum


1 Rooftops of Glasgow’s iconic Riverside Museum of Transport, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects


2 Parish Church of St. Matthäus in Düsseldorf, Germany, photographed in 2020


ALL IMAGES: HÉLÈNE BINET


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