Ezra Stoller, Architectural Photographer
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: By MARGALIT FOX
NY Times
Ezra Stoller, a celebrated architectural photographer whose
work introduced the viewing public to the high modernism of
the postwar era, died on Friday at his home in Williamstown,
Mass. He was 89.
The cause was complications of a recent stroke, his
daughter, Erica, said.
Trained as an architect, Mr. Stoller photographed most of
the important buildings of the 1950's and 60's, including
Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, Eero Saarinen's
T.W.A. Terminal and Louis I. Kahn's Salk Institute for
Biological Studies.
''He had a pretty deep appreciation of the kinds of
strengths of modern architecture: simplicity, proportion,
balance,'' William S. Saunders, the author of ''Modern
Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller'' (Abrams, 1990),
said in a telephone interview. ''He was dedicated to showing
buildings in the best possible way.''
Mr. Stoller was not merely a documenter but also an
interpreter of buildings, translating an architect's
three-dimensional vision into two-dimensional abstract
compositions that had a sweeping beauty of their own. Famous
for his ability to capture a building from just the right
angle and in just the right light, he was often commissioned
by the world's leading architects, who spoke, in hopeful
tones, of having their creations ''Stollerized.''
''I see my work in a way that is analogous to a musician
given a score to play who must bring it to life and make the
piece as good as it can be,'' said Mr. Stoller, in an
interview quoted in a brochure about a current show of his
work at the Williams College Museum of Art. ''While I cannot
make a bad building good, I can draw out the strengths in a
work that has strength.''
Shooting primarily in black and white and using a
large-format camera, Mr. Stoller laid meticulous groundwork,
often spending days watching the light move across the
surface of a building before he ever clicked the shutter.
''He would almost 'stalk' the building and approach it from
every angle and make all these diagrams,'' said Deborah
Rothschild, the curator of ''Ezra Stoller: Architectural
Photography,'' on view at Williams through Dec. 19. ''That,
combined with a natural gift for composition and clarity,
enabled him to get just the right vantage point.''
The resulting images, published widely in newspapers and
magazines as well as in architectural books, were praised
for their crispness, sharp tonal contrast and cool,
controlled stance. Because Mr. Stoller's work was portable
in a way that his subjects could never be, it was often the
only way for far-flung viewers to experience the buildings
of titans like Wright, Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei, Philip
Johnson, Richard Meier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mr.
Stoller received the Architectural Photography Medal from
the American Institute of Architects in 1961.
Mr. Stoller's images reflected his own aesthetic
sensibility, but they also communicated something vital
about the architect's. Photographing at the Guggenheim, he
resisted the natural temptation to climb to the top of the
museum's inverted ziggurat and shoot the gallery below.
Instead, his photograph looks dizzyingly upward, flattening
the famous whorls into an abstract form that suggests a
chambered nautilus. ''He captures this whole spiral, and you
see the organic inspiration for most of Wright's work,'' Ms.
Rothschild said.
Photographing the Salk Institute in San Diego, Mr. Stoller
maneuvered himself into an awkward position in order to
catch what Ms. Rothschild described as ''the almost Cubistic
way the building works.''
Ezra Stoller was born on May 16, 1915, in Chicago. He
received a bachelor's degree in 1938 from the School of
Architecture and Allied Arts at New York University. During
World War II he taught photography at the Army Signal Corps
Photo Center in New York. In 1966 he founded the photo
agency Esto Photographics, which represents his work and
that of other architectural photographers.
Besides his daughter, of Rye, N.Y., Mr. Stoller is survived
by his wife, the former Helen Rubin; two sons, Evan, of New
Lebanon, N.Y., and Lincoln, of Shokan, N.Y.; five
grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Interviewed about his craft, Mr. Stoller tended to deflect
critical praise. ''Architecture, being a sensory experience,
must be interpreted through a sensory medium,'' he told The
New York Times in 1991. ''I never claimed that my work is
art. The art is the architecture.''