Hélène Binet

In The Intimacy of Making, London-based Swiss-French photographer Hélène Binet (born 1959) takes us on a visual journey through a world of stone, walls and gardens to depict and celebrate the Korean art of making, and to discover traditional Korean architecture through a Western lens.

In Binet’s photographs, which were taken over the course of the last three years, we encounter three typologies of traditional architecture in South Korea: the Confucian school and sacred site of Byeongsan Seowon; the garden and tea house Soswaewon; and the Jongmyo shrine. Her camera unites the natural surrounds and the built structures to convey the atmosphere of these three sites.

The photographic essays are accompanied by two texts: Korean architect Byoung Soo Cho offers insight into the cultural and architectural history, while art and design critic and teacher Eugnie Shinkle focuses on the Korean makerly ethos.

In the classical gardens of Suzhou in China, surface transforms into space and walls become landscapes. In her journey through this UNESCO World Heritage Site, London-based Swiss French photographer Hélène Binet (born 1959) captures the traces of environmental influences on built structures. Her impressive series of photography shows how weather and time have turned blank walls into vivid depictions of nature. In Binet’s images, architecture becomes the frame for imaginary landscapes. By interweaving foreground and background, the artist tells stories that shift between the two dimensions of the plane and the three dimensions of space.

In an accompanying essay, architect and writer Juhani Pallasmaa captures the dreamlike quality of the photographs and emphasizes Binet’s skill of balancing precision and vagueness to create images that stimulate the viewer’s imagination.

Over the past 30 years, the French Swiss architectural photographer Hélène Binet (born 1959) has traveled the world to photograph historic and contemporary buildings, as well as projects in the making, to create some of the most exquisite architectural photography of our time. Considered by many the premier “architect’s photographer,” Binet has worked closely with Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Peter Zumthor among others, who have turned to her to interpret their work. Using only analogue techniques, Binet’s photographs are both a representation and a discovery of her subjects, all of them buildings that break the mold, pushing daringly at the boundaries of their time.

In this concise and affordable selection of some 90 of her photographs—ranging from the Baroque London churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor and the Jantar Mantar Observatory in Jaipur to more recent works by Le Corbusier, Peter Zumthor, John Hejduk, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid—Binet’s work is revealed in all its subtlety and quiet sensitivity.