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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 millimetre — 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.

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 harbour 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.

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.

I shoot black and white and he's the great colourist. 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 colour.

• 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.

Colour 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.

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