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Stollerized
January 19-March 23, 2008
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©Ezra Stoller
TWA Terminal; Architect: Eero Saarinen, 1962
gelatin silver print
gift of Stephen C. Sherrill (PA 1971)
Addison Gallery of American Art
Photographs: Ezra Stoller © Esto. All rights reserved.
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From the mid-1940s through the 1960s, Ezra Stoller (1915–2004) photographed the works of many architectural giants, including Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of the architects, who commissioned Stoller to photograph their buildings, considered the project incomplete until it was “Stollerized.” This exhibition features thirteen photographs of Modernist buildings scattered across the United States.
Trained as an architect at the New York University School of Architecture and Allied Arts, Stoller had no formal instruction in photography. After graduating in 1938, he became a freelance photographer specializing in architecture and industrial subjects. Shooting primarily in black and white and using a large-format camera, he sought what he called the “idea” of the building. Stoller possessed an unparalleled ability to interpret and translate important structural elements, innovations, and spatial relationships. The artist once said, “While I cannot make a bad building good, I can draw out the strengths in a work that has strength. But I never claimed my work is art. The art is the architecture.”
Stoller’s photographs present crisp and balanced compositions and convey an order and control ideally suited to his Modernist subjects. His deliberate choice of vantage points, perspectives, and light creates a sense of pictorial depth, pushing the limitations of photography’s two-dimensionality. In 1962, Eero Saarinen intended for the TWA terminal at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) to echo the excitement and energy circulating around air travel. Composed and theatrical, the photograph documents the architect’s vision and reads as an abstract image of fluid forms and serpentine shadows.
As a documenter and interpreter of these landmarks in modern architecture, Ezra Stoller is remembered as one of the leading American architectural photographers of his era.
We are grateful to Stephen C. Sherrill for the generous gift of the Ezra Stoller photographs featured in this exhibition and for his continuing support for the Addison.
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