Beyond Architecture, with images selected from the entire Stoller archive of more than 50,000 images, includes views of Post-War American factories, construction sites, hydroelectric dams and printing plants. The photographs capture a sense of a “lost America” – an America that once was, and is no longer – including photographs of workers making televisions in Queens and calculators in Pennsylvania, and the conveyor belts and inner-workings of the Life Savers and Heinz ketchup factories, all photographed with the artist’s keen Modernist sensibility and careful attention to vantage point, lighting conditions, line, color and texture.
The exhibition covers the full range of Stoller’s work, including images commissioned by Fortune, Architectural Forum, and House Beautiful magazines in the 1940s and for commercial projects for IBM, Upjohn Pharmaceuticals and CBS in the 1940s and 1950s. Included are photographs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s John Hancock Building, Chicago, and the United Nations Headquarters, designed by an international team of architects led by Wallace K. Harrison and including Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier.
Ezra Stoller is known as one of the most influential photographers of Modern architecture. He created iconic images of mid-Century buildings that help define the cultural memory of structures such as the Saarinen’s TWA Terminal, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Of Stoller’s work, architecture critic Paul Goldberger once noted, “…his work has made him perhaps the most celebrated architectural photographer of the 20th Century; his pictures…have in and of themselves played a major role in shaping the public’s perception of what modern architecture is about.”
Ezra Stoller was born in Chicago in 1915 and graduated from New York University in 1938 with a degree in Industrial Design. As part of his war service, he worked with Paul Strand at the Office for Emergency Management and at the Signal Corps Photo Center. In 1961, Stoller was awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in numerous museum collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Ezra Stoller
Ezra Stoller Photographs Frank Lloyd Wright
June 29 – August 25, 2017
Yossi Milo Gallery
245 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
www.yossimilo.com
Hahn Shoe Store, Ketchum, Washington, DC, 1947
Philip Morris Research Center Tower, Ulrich Franzen, Richmond, VA, 1972
CBS Columbia, Long Island City, NY, 1954
CBS Columbia Records, 1953
Olivetti Underwood Factory, Louis Kahn, Harrisburg, PA, 1969
IBM 702 Machine, 1955
Brenner House, Harry Weese, Champaign, IL, 1952
