ANDOVER - Ezra Stoller was a great artist, but it would be hard to deduce that truth from the 13 images on display here at the Addison Gallery at Phillips Andover Academy.
Stoller (1915-2004) was an architectural photographer. He flourished during the heyday of the modern movement in American architecture, from the early 1940s through the early '70s. His images were often superior, in artistic quality and cultural influence, to the buildings they recorded.
So influential was Stoller's work that many architects didn't feel a building was complete until it had been "Stollerized" - a term that gives this exhibit its name. He came to have as much influence on architectural taste as did the architects whose buildings he recorded. He was the acknowledged leader of a generation of great photographers who believed in modernism and promoted it with evocative images.
Alas, you'd never guess Stoller's greatness from this show. I wasn't sure the prints on view were all even done by Stoller himself, but his daughter Erica, who manages his archive, believes they were. But the Addison's lighting is too dim to bring out the amazing tonal range of a Stoller print. By a chance that would have made the photographer grind his teeth, photos by his disliked West Coast rival, Julius Schulman, are better lit in this same Addison Gallery in another show called "Birth of the Cool."
That said, there are a couple here of Stoller's best. One is a 1962 shot of the interior of the TWA terminal at JFK in New York, by the architect Eero Saarinen. Stoller creates an image that is a metaphor for the aerial swoop of planes and the excitement, in that era, of flight. As passengers move up and down the ramps and steps, we share the sense of entering on an adventure. And somehow, despite using a shutter speed that freezes these moving figures, Stoller achieves his characteristic depth of field, where everything is sharp from the nearest railing to the farthest window. Stoller's mastery of deep focus in black-and-white often reminds you of the films of his contemporary, Orson Welles. (Stoller's photo may soon be all that remains of the terminal. The TWA is today a preservation crisis, currently mothballed and soon to be surrounded by a new terminal for Jet Blue.)
Another winner is an undated interior of the Glass House in Connecticut, by architect Philip Johnson. Stoller captures the modernist merging of indoor and outdoor space in a brilliant image. The other photos are also of modernist icons, by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright (five photos), Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer. They're all worth a look, but none shows the artist at his very best, at least not as they're presented here.
The Stollers were purchased from a New York gallery by Stephen C. Sherrill, an Andover alum and trustee, who donated them to the Addison.
Very different, though also architectural, is an exhibit at the
Kellner employs a technique he invented himself. A single camera, mounted on a tripod, is tilted and moved in such a manner as to make as many as 360 shots of each scene. The resulting strips of film are then grouped into a wall mural. Each mural looks like - and in fact it literally is - a photographer's contact sheet, with each strip clearly visible, including not only the framed images but also the film's dark edges. Always slightly out of kilter with one another, the tiny images create a kaleidosopic fragmentation of the visible world.
It's a fascinating way of seeing. The film's edges create a black grid that reminds you of the black-and-white modernism beloved by Stoller. The grid could be the elevation of a skyscraper like the Seagram building. But here the grid is superimposed on a riot of colored images, which fragment the subject into many tiny glimpses.
Kellner is self-taught. "I am not a trained photographer," he emphasizes. (Stoller, too, was self-taught.) In a recent talk at the Athenaeum, he described his process and spoke of the influence of early 20th century Cubist painters such as Robert Delaunay. Like the Cubists, Kellner invents a way of presenting a subject from many points of view simultaneously. As Athenaeum director Richard Wendorf points out in the catalog, this is as "real" a way of seeing as any other. After all, the camera cannot lie.
Kellner creates a unique tension. The black grid, with its bureaucratic numbering of each image, seems to impose an authoritarian order on the scene, an order from which the colored images are trying to escape. There are, of course, other possible sources besides Cubism. Wendorf mentions David Hockney and his collages of Polaroid images. Perhaps, too, there is a reminiscence of the stop-motion serial images of Eadweard Muybridge and other early photographers. And for this viewer the tracery of black lines over rich colors can't help evoking the stained glass window of a cathedral.
The Athenaeum was Kellner's first attempt at interior spaces. The show's catalog prints some stunning exterior views, done earlier, of the Eiffel Tower, Stonehenge, and a British country house. The Athenaeum images are much denser, a kind of visual orgy where towers of books dance crazily with tables and balconies. Either way, this is fascinating work.
Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.
rising
falling 