Lucien
Hervé: Building Images
by Olivier Beer
Getty Publications, Los Angeles, CA, 2004
224 pp., illus. 205 b/w. Trade, $60.00
ISBN: 0-89236-754-7.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be
Lucien Hervé was, no doubt, one
of the most important architectural photographers
of the twentieth century. As the main
chronicler of Le Corbusier, he documented
the architect's work from 1949 until his
death in 1965. It would be a grave mistake,
though, to think of him only as an adjunctory
to the great man. Hervé began publishing
his 1938 in French publications and built
an oeuvre entirely his own, including
portraits and images of everyday life
on city streets.
Lucien Hervé was born as László
Elkán in Hódmezovásárhely,
Hungary in 1910. He started art studies
in Vienna in 1928 but moved to be with
his brother in Paris in 1929, taking a
job as a bank clerk. Soon, he started
working as a designer for the fashion
industry, after which he became secretary
general of a branch of the Communist Party
in Paris for some time and than moved
on to write for a French magazine. When
the photographer with whom he had been
collaborating moved to Spain in 1938,
he himself took the camera and started
on his main career in life. As we are
writing this, Hervé is still working
on a project to illustrate the modernity
of the ancients.
This seemingly erratic early career is
just the start of a lifelong journey as
an artist, the story of which is lovingly
told by Olivier Beer in the extended introductory
essay in this book. But let us turn to
Hervé's work again.
The book has over 200 images in black
and white. And that is exactly what it
is: black and white. Hervé is a
photographer of contrasts, of sharp lines,
geometrical compositions and clear boundaries.
Whether he portrays his friend Le Corbusier,
the street life in Bombay or Paris, the
buildings of Chandighar or the temples
of Greece, clouds ands skylines even or
children playing in the street, every
picture is bauhaus-like clean and
carefully framed. There seems to be no
need or reason to document or represent
the objects and people before the camera,
unless the resulting image is a perfect
composition in its own right. Deep shadows
and bright sunlight strengthen the austere
lines of the buildings and unexpected
camera anglesoften with the
camera at a point where no man could possibly
standemphasize the theoretical
qualities of the architecture's design.
This is at once the strength and the weakness
of Hervé's art. No one lives in
these buildings. There are only lines
and the exaggerated pictorial and necessarily
two-dimensional beauty of still images.
No life is possible, even, since motion
and the passing of time would destroy
the perfection of the composition, the
balance of the black and white planes
and the carefully chosen angles. Hervé
would have loved a motionless sun in the
Indian or French sky. It seems as if he
would prefer an architect who builds in
order to be able to make nice pictures.
No doubt Hervé is a photographer
who came at the right moment. For the
audiences in Europe who couldn't afford
to travel to Brazil or India or even Ronchamp,
he made Le Corbusier's architecture palatable.
He constructed an impression of classically
perfect buildings with spotless walls
and elegant if impossible skylines, set
against cloudless skies. The man-made
world, it seems, could still be flawless,
as if nothing had happened in those years
when Europe was shot to pieces by the
madness of the war machine. Hervé
stuck to interbellum ideals and supported
the misplaced optimism of the fifties
and early sixties. If you want to know
why generations of students of architecture
actually could be made to believe in the
sad utopias of Brazilia and Chandighar,
come to Hervé. If you want an antidote
to an upsurge of postmodern or even existentialist
ennui, let yourself be charmed
by the pictures in this otherwise magnificent
book.