A Review of Le Corbusier & Lucien Hervé. The Architect & the Photographer: a Dialogue

Abstract

Originally published in French under the evocative title 'Le Corbusier / Lucien Hervé / Contacts (L’ Atelier d’édition, 2011), Le Corbusier & Lucien Hervé. The Architect & the Photographer: a Dialogue 'turns our gaze, perhaps for the first time, away from the artistic importance of the photographs themselves that only indirectly illuminate the architectural value of the images. Jacques Sbriglio, editor of the book, has selected sixteen buildings by Le Corbusier - from Paris to Ronchamp, from Chandigarh to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin: he briefly describes each of them, and illustrates the texts with a selection of contact prints made by Hervé and held today in the Fondation Le Corbusier. In the Fondation there are thousands of contact prints, all assembled on 1,200 colourful pieces of cardboard: 184 of these can now be seen in this new publication. The sheets represent the channel of communication between the photographer and the architect, so the former could select images to illustrate particular aspects of each project. Sometimes Le Corbusier produced sketches from the contact prints and sent these drawings to Lucien Hervé so the photographer could select a particular image from the archive.