AUGUST SALZMANN / LUCIEN HERVÉ / JAMES CASEBERE
Minimalism in architecture’s photography from the origins untill today. Three photographers, three centuries, three perceptions.
August Salzmann in Jerusalem in 1854. One century after, Lucien Hervé in The Thoronet Abbey, and in The Cité Radieuse by Le Corbusier. Nowadays James Casebere and his models of imaginary architecture. Despite the distance between these three artists and their processes, one same research around shape, abstraction, minimalism is treated through architecture’s photography.
August Salzmann realizes a set of photographs during his stay in Jerusalem in 1854, at the request of his friend and archaeologist Félix de Saulcy. Salzmann’s mysterious images are considered as some of the most inspired masterworks of the documentary porto-folio. Lucien Hervé really devoted himself to photography in 1947, after being first stylist for Patou, Chanel, Lanvin, painter and athlete. Modernity is very much present in his art, in keeping with the interwar’s avant-gardes, such as Germaine Krull, Moholy-Nagy, Bauhaus. His long collaboration with Le Corbusier starts in 1949, with more than 600 images taken from the Cité Radieuse. James Casebere builds tabletop models of anonymous architectural spaces : (tunnels, monastic cells, corridors…) where the void, the confinement, the flood are threatening in almost every image.