Hélène Binet: Light Lines At The Royal Academy

by Sam Lewis

Hélène Binet is one of the world’s leading architectural photographers, having worked with the world’s most elite architects for over 30 years, the photographs she has produced are some of the most unique and remarkable ever made. Because of this, I recently went to an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, featuring 90 of her most stunning photographs from across her career. 

Binet grew up in Rome, and studied photography at the Istituto Europeo di Design, surrounded by the monumental ruins it is easy to see where Binet gets her distinct style from. Binet aims to capture small snippets of architecture in her work, instead of focusing on a whole building, she will focus on a single wall or crevice, focusing on a few impactful elements instead of capturing the building as a whole. By concentrating on small snippets of the building, such as the dance of light on a barren concrete floor, Binet can create very abstract compositions, and capture the essence of a building from only one fragment.

 This is part of the reason why the pieces are best viewed in an exhibition, often over a metre in size, the photographs are much more impactful, and because Binet works exclusively with photographic film, the vast detail and contrast of the photos is breathtaking. It is easy to see how the great monoliths of Rome influenced Binet’s work, as being a child against the great Roman obelisks, Binet was not able to grasp the full context of the architecture, but only the finer details of the architecture, as Zaha Hadid puts it: “Binet’s Photography allowed me to see beauty in unexpected places, observations that fell back into the design process.”

Zaha Hadid’s architecture was present in the exhibition too, being extremely futuristic and lavish, it stood out from the rugged Brutalist works around it. The vast swooping curves and sharp angular edges of her architecture seemed surreal, focusing more on the contrast and shape of the buildings than the texture. It is very clear why Binet has been dubbed the ‘Architect’s photographer’, as she manages to capture the light, space, form and texture of the works she studies to reveal the soul of the building and “exposes architecture’s achievements, strength, pathos and fragility.”

 

 I very much enjoyed the exhibition, having never been to an exhibition of photography before I did not know what to expect, but the abstract quality of Binet’s style made her works feel more like large oil paintings, and her ability to capture the very essence of a building rather than to record it was a completely new experience.