Book Review

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Reviewed by: LC Foto: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer by Tim Benton Daniel Naegele (bio) LC Foto: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer Tim Benton Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2013 Widely regarded as the most influential architect of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier wrote more than fifty books, nearly all of them with extensive illustrative text. Yet in these books he almost never used the photographs he himself took. Rather, the books are most often illustrated with photographs that Le Corbusier appropriated from other publications, nearly always modifying, cropping, and ordering these images before placing them on his pages. Books made from these pages ultimately formed collections; and these collections became essential to Le Corbusier’s promotion of his view of modern architecture and modernist ideals. Photography was at the heart of this endeavor. Because of the importance of photography to modernism in general and to Le Corbusier in particular, Tim Benton’s LC Foto: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer is of great interest. Benton is one of many fine architectural historians that Le Corbusier has attracted over the past three decades. His books on the architect include the 1984 Villas of Le Corbusier, 1920–1930; the 1987 catalog Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century; and the 2007 Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer. An excellent architectural photographer himself, Benton has conducted research into the medium and its association with architecture for decades. In LC Foto, he examines numerous photographs that Le Corbusier took during two periods, 1907–17 and 1936–38, organizing these photographs into thirteen albums and reproducing many that have never before been published. The initial half of the book, “Jeanneret’s First Photographic Campaign, 1907–1917,” examines the early photographs made by Le Corbusier before he adopted the pseudonym “Le Corbusier,” some six hundred photographs taken mostly on Jeanneret’s now-famous voyage d’orient of 1910–11 and first documented by Giuliano Gresleri in 1985. Benton reveals his archival findings chronologically, aligning the photographs with the young Jeanneret’s first, second, and third cameras, elaborating with authority and insight on the properties of each instrument. He presents these photographs in four albums, each containing photographs taken at four different times. By aligning the cameras that Jeanneret owned during each of these times with the photographs that he made, Benton determines convincingly which images were made when and [End Page 99] how the images were affected by the limitations of the equipment employed. He tells us about the cameras, lenses, and films available to the amateur photographer at different times, describing the costs and capabilities of each, and explaining why Jeanneret chose this camera over that one. These detailed discussions of the day’s commonly available photographic equipment, as well as informing us of Jeanneret’s situation, tell us a great deal about the nature of popular image making in the early part of the twentieth century in general. The second half of the book, titled “Le Corbusier, the Cinema, and Cinematographic Photography, 1936–38,” is concerned with photographs and films that Le Corbusier made with what Benton describes as a “small 16mm film camera equipped with a stop-frame feature.” Benton found some of this film still undeveloped at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. Other short films that Le Corbusier made were featured in Jacques Barsac’s three-part documentary on Le Corbusier made for French television in 1987. In LC Foto, Benton reproduces them as stills in nine albums, while providing “QR patches” behind, which are “seven montages of film sequences shot by Le Corbusier on his Siemens camera” (4). Benton doesn’t simply tell us about the photographs, he shows them to us, generously exhibiting the photographs that he found in a refreshingly matter-of-fact, “see for yourself” manner. The nine 1930s albums consist of photographs of Le Corbusier’s mother, wife, and dog; of a month in Rio; of an ocean liner; of a beach at Le Piquey; of the rocks of Plougrescant, Brittany; of Algeria; and of the house Eileen Gray designed at Roquebrune, E1027. Many of the photographs are what Benton terms “snaps.” Few are artistically original, though. The most unusual of the photographs—photographs of stacked building...