His work preserves modernist architecture

WILLIAMSTOWN -- Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum and his famous house called Fallingwater, Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at New York's Kennedy Airport, Paul Rudolph's Art + Architecture Building at Yale University, Louis Kahn's Salk Institute: All are icons of American modernist architecture.

Even people who haven't seen them know what they look like -- in part through the photographs of Ezra Stoller, a "portraitist of buildings," as Deborah Rothschild puts it. Curator of the new Stoller exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art, Rothschild demonstrates through this impressive display why architects waited in line to employ him.

The architecture in the show dates from 1958-65. So do most of the images: Stoller was usually commissioned to immortalize freshly finished buildings. Being "Stollerized" was how architect Philip Johnson put it.

Rothschild has wisely focused on this tight time period when High Modernist architecture came into its own in America. She's used only black-and-white images, although Stoller also worked in color. She's grouped together up to 10 images of each building, interiors and exteriors. By the time you get through this gem of a show, you feel you really know them.

Stoller, who lives in Williamstown, once compared himself to a musician interpreting the score of a great composer. "Interpreting" is the key word here. Born in 1915 and trained as an architect himself, Stoller stalked buildings by day and night, in different seasons and weather, to get the shots he wanted. The Museum of Modern Art commissioned him to photograph Fallingwater in 1963. He arrived in summer, when the foliage was so lush he thought it a distraction from Wright's design. So in 1971 he returned -- on his own time, without a commission -- to photograph the house when the trees were bare and he could achieve a more linear composition.

Stoller's TWA images make you wistful about the days when air travel was glamorous. A nocturnal picture of the terminal illuminated from within, the huge arcing wings of the roofline suggesting a spaceship about to take off, is pure science fiction. A more mundane daytime view is from the perspective of the parking lot: The 1950s cars date the picture, as Stoller no doubt intended, but not the building, which comes across as timeless. The precision of his photos does not rule out poetry. A shot of passengers walking down a long departure tunnel with celestial lighting suggests they're about to board a plane bound for another world rather than for, say, Cleveland.

So meticulously detailed are Stoller's pictures that in some cases they are used as references for restoration. The Yale building is an example: It suffered serious damage in a 1969 fire of mysterious origins, then was subjected to a number of unsympathetic renovations, and is only now being restored to Rudolph's original design, in a Brutalist mode that was highly controversial. Stoller was its champion. He lovingly captured the building's concrete facing and made the structure into a play of planes that appear to have slid together for the moment. The interior photos make the space seem "like being inside a Cubist painting," as Rothschild says. Its multiple staircases, overlapping and intersecting, particularly intrigued the photographer.

Mies's design for the Seagram Building gave both architect and photographer unparalleled opportunities. Mies nimbly navigated New York zoning laws dictating that the higher the building, the deeper the setback had to be. He turned much of the midtown Manhattan site into an open plaza and set the skyscraper 100 feet back. With that much space to work in, Stoller could get enough distance to capture the entire building, top to bottom.

It was Phyllis Lambert, the art patron who was the daughter of Seagram CEO Samuel Bronfman, who had chosen Mies and then arranged the introduction to Stoller, which proved awkward. The two men sat in silence. In an effort to smooth things over, Lambert famously told Mies that "Mr. Stoller will take many pictures and we will select a few." Stoller didn't comply, because his method was the reverse: Make every shot count. ("Editing after taking a large number of relatively thoughtless pictures is less likely to turn up much of value," he wrote.) With the later advent of smaller cameras and cheaper, faster film, he did start taking more images -- "but often," he wrote, "these pictures were notes, telling me what I needed to go back and re-shoot."

The Seagram's pictures are masterpieces. They are also priceless, as the surrounding area has been so built up since that the same images couldn't be taken today. And Stoller and Mies's aversion to each other perhaps inspired a jokey image with the skyscraper surrounded by a construction site, surrounded in turn by a fence on which a poster advertises Palisades Park. It features a girl in a bathing suit, leaning back and winking. Her availability makes Mies's austere masterpiece seem all the more buttoned-up.

Of the series in the Williamstown show, the one of the Guggenheim is the finest and most daring. Wright's radical architecture inspired furious debate, including a petition signed by Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and other star painters of the day, claiming the building wasn't suitable for the display of art. Wright countered that the building was the museum's most important work of art, setting off the art vs. architecture argument that, a half-century later, is still going strong.

There are more people in the Guggenheim photos than in the others in this exhibition, as if Stoller wanted to make the point that visitors found the space enticing. Some are stark black silhouettes in the white space, their gazes turned intently to the pictures as if to refute the artists' petition. Most dramatic of all is a vertiginous view of the interior, spiraling up to a glass dome in a spiderweb pattern that has long since been replaced.

A serendipitous shot of the Guggenheim that Stoller took from across the street shows two nuns walking in front of it. They form a black triangle that reverses the white funnel form of the architecture. Years later, the museum commissioned images from another photographer -- who hired models and dressed them in nuns' habits to replicate, and pay tribute to, Stoller's by then legendary composition.