Hélène Binet

Over a period of forty years, Hélène Binet has photographed both contemporary and historical architecture – this is the first retrospective monograph of her work. It includes two extensive essays: In ‘Becoming Binet’, Marco Iuliano details Hélène Binet’s background, from her childhood in the Italian fishing village of Sperlonga and in Rome, through her early ‘discovery’ of architectural photographer Lucien Hervé, to other significant influences, like the early collaborations with Daniel Libeskind, John Hedjuk and the connections with Architectural Association (AA) in London where she met Zaha Hadid. The essay discusses in detail Binet’s approach to photography, her process and archive. It also examines key themes running through her work and the more recent developments, which include abstraction through photography. In ‘Positioning Binet’, Martino Stierli sets Binet’s work within the conceptual framework of architectural photography, discussing whether an architectural photograph is an inventory of a building or space, a translation into a two-dimensional image or, rather, an image in its own right; an artifact that loosely relates to the original object or phenomenon. Within this context, Stierli argues that Binet’s oeuvre seems to oscillate between two obsessions: a desire to translate spatial phenomena into the two-dimensional space of the image and a quest to articulate the modulation of light on a surface. These essays are followed by a catalogue of Binet's work, which is framed within a series of her recurring themes.