Eyes

Corbusier's photographer, and the closest single match to my eye I've found.

• Didn't document buildings. Cropped them until only the line was left.
• Concrete, one hard diagonal, and enormous fields of nothing.
• Steal: crop until only the geometry survives. If the building's still identifiable, I stopped too early.
• Start: Chandigarh — concrete, sun, shadow, and nothing else doing the work.

Shadowless on purpose. They waited for cloud so that no specimen could outshine another.

• From 1959, half a century of winding gear, gas tanks and water towers — industrial plant they called anonymous sculpture, hung in grids of one kind at a time.
• A large-format camera under overcast skies, front and side elevations, no shadow anywhere. The flat light was a requirement, not a mood: a cast shadow would have made one specimen unlike the rest.
• Steal: shoot the grid, not the frame. Same light, same distance, same height — or it is just four photographs.
• Start: Water Towers. A wall of one thing, and the differences arrive on their own.

Photographs modern buildings deliberately out of focus, focused at twice infinity, until only the form is left. The answer to whether my high key is a fault.

• Ronchamp, the Seagram, the Empire State — reduced to mass and edge, with no detail at all.
• Pale, weightless, enormous. Nothing is sharp and nothing is missing.
• Steal: detail is not the subject. If the form survives losing the detail, lose it on purpose.
• Start: the Architecture series — the strongest argument anyone has made that softness is a position, not an error.

Blank tilt-up walls, photographed fifty-one times without comment.

• The repetition is the whole argument. No single frame in it is the good one, and that is deliberate.
• Everything my cut pile is — flat, vacant, ordinary — done on purpose, and at length. Chosen, not failed.
• Steal: shoot the set, not the hero. Square-on, same distance, including the dull ones.
• Start: The New Industrial Parks near Irvine. It names its own addresses — go stand at one.

Where Shulman sells, Mudford just states.

• Large-format, austere, deliberately undramatic. Blank walls, loading docks.
• The parts of this city nobody has ever put on a postcard — which is why the harbor is his.
• Steal: refuse the drama. Frontal, level, no flourish. The structure is enough.
• Start: the industrial LA work — Vernon, the port, the flat frontages.

The same city, taken all the way to abstraction.

• Modernist LA in black and white, cropped so close the building stops being a building and becomes a shape.
• Built entirely on this city's hard sun — his publisher's words are "the whitest whites, the blackest blacks", the light bleaching the landscape pale.
• Steal: crop until the streetscape is gone. He keeps the structure and throws away everything that explains where it is.
• Start: Whitewash. Seven years on one idea, begun while he was still a student.

The purest teacher of negative space there is.

• Decades of reducing — one tree against snow, a line of grass on white.
• Almost nothing in the frame, and nothing I'd take out.
• Steal: remove until it breaks, then put one thing back.
• Start: the Chicago snow and grass studies. Near-abstract, near-empty.

Photographs details of famous houses, never the houses — and did it to Lautner, here, in Los Angeles. The exact discipline my own frames keep failing.

• Windows, a closet, a cabinet edge. The building is never established, only felt.
• Aalto, Barragán, Breuer, Lautner, Mies, Neutra, Niemeyer, Schindler, Wright — each one reduced to a single aperture of light.
• Steal: photograph the window, not the house. She is the proof the whole building was never needed.
• Start: the Lautner windows — my city, my kind of building, none of my stepping back.

The man who taught America what its own modernism looked like.

• Precise and frontal. Waited for the hour a building explained itself.
• So definitive architects said a building had been "Stollerized".
• Steal: column rhythm. Repetition is the subject — find the interval and shoot the interval.
• Start: TWA Flight Center. A concrete curve as pure movement.

High-contrast black and white pushed until shadow stops describing and starts building the picture.

• Half the frame usually black. The small lit fragment carries everything.
• Made composites too — grids of hundreds of exposures printed as one object.
• Steal: let black be most of the frame. Expose for the highlight, abandon the rest on purpose.
• Start: City Whispers — a figure in one blade of light.

Still shooting film, still printing by hand, and the best living argument that this is about light and mass rather than buildings.

• Zumthor, Hadid, Libeskind.
• Frames often unreadable as plans, unmistakable as feeling.
• Steal: underexpose and let the shadow hold the form. Weight over detail.
• Start: the Zumthor baths at Vals — stone, water, dark.

He sold the world on LA modernism, and Case Study #22 is the most reproduced architectural photograph ever made.

• Two women in a glass corner, over a grid of city lights.
• It's staged, lit and composed to the millimeter — worth knowing, because it's easy to read as luck.
• Steal: make the geometry read as a life. He put the figure exactly where the composition needed a mark.
• Start: Stahl House. Then go back and count the set-up.

Enormously broad — portraits, surfers, high-school football — but for me it's Freeways.

• Small platinum prints of LA overpasses with no cars and no people in them.
• Sweeping concrete against white sky. The infrastructure as a drawing.
• Steal: empty the frame of people and the structure becomes a line. The absence is the subject.
• Start: Freeways. Eleven of them teach the whole idea.

Not really a photographer — an artist who used photographs as deadpan inventory.

• Every building on a boulevard. Thirty-four parking lots, shot from a helicopter.
• No hierarchy, no best shot. The typology is the work.
• Steal: shoot the set, not the hero. Consistency across many frames beats one great one.
• Start: Thirtyfour Parking Lots — top-down, and pure geometry almost by accident.

Architectural fragments — a cantilever, a curve, a stair edge, detached from any building I could name.

• Working now, and prolific — the most directly usable reference here.
• Steal: photograph the part, never the whole. A building's best twenty degrees.
• Start: the ongoing fragment series.

Parking structures, transit halls, stairwells — the civic interiors everyone walks past.

• Dead-center, symmetrical. Evidence the quiet-infrastructure instinct is a whole vein.
• Steal: center it and commit. Perfect symmetry is a choice, not a failure of nerve.
• Start: the parking-structure work.

I shoot black and white and he's the great colorist. He still earns the bench, on two counts.

• Cape Light is about air and light, not hue — quiet, expansive, still.
• St. Louis and the Arch is a whole book about one sweeping curved structure. That's my strongest subject, sustained.
• Steal: photograph one structure until it's exhausted. Many hours, many distances.
• Start: St. Louis and the Arch. It maps to the eye, not the palette.

Landscape flattened into bands of pure color.

• No depth, no incident. The horizon placed with total confidence.
• Shows how far reduction goes before a photograph becomes a painting.
• Steal: flatten depth on purpose. Long lens, straight on, let the planes stack.
• Start: the Puglia landscapes. Three bands and nothing else.

Color and rigidly geometric. The palette isn't mine but the composition logic is exactly mine.

• Pastel facades cropped to abstraction, against clean sky.
• Steal: square up and crop to the module. One repeating element, edge to edge.
• Start: anything from the Berlin facade series.

One desert crossroads, rebuilt out of hundreds of prints.

• He spent a week at a junction on Pearblossom Highway and assembled it rather than framed it.
• The argument that a place gives more to many positions than to one correct one.
• Steal: work one spot until it runs out. Many angles, no favorite among them.
• Start: Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986 #2. The junction is still there, on the way to nowhere in particular.