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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 angles——often with the camera at a point where no man could possibly stand——emphasize 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.

 

 




Updated 1st February 2005


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