Dancing in the Dark: The Architectural Photography of Hélène Binet

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If the second and third dimensions were battling each other, the Swiss photographer Hélène Binet would be something of the cunning go-between. Well known for photographing architecture, she has a knack for giving depth to the flat plane of a 2-D photograph.

Pitting two dimensions against each other, her pictures seize empty spaces and fold, braid and twist them into knots. For her, light has material properties â€" cutting like a scythe or covering like a blanket. Her work, collected in a new monograph from Phaidon called “Composing Space,” is about bending preconceptions.

“It comes from the feeling that you cannot represent real space in photography,” said Ms. Binet, 53. “You’re looking for this third dimension all the time, but it’s almost impossible.”

The book presents work dating back to the late 1980s, conjuring mystery while bridging the flat and the physical in counterintuitive ways. She has worked with architectural luminaries like Peter Zumthor, Le Corbusier and Daniel Libeskind, whose latest high-profile work, One World Trade Center, was recently crowned with a spire in Manhattan. One doesn’t get more 3-D than a tower that thrusts 1,776 feet into the air.

But Ms. Binet isn’t interested in showing buildings as grand structures on a landscape. Instead, she zooms in, hiding some parts of a space to reveal new qualities in others.

“I try to see how I can bring one experience out that somehow is referring to the third dimension,” Ms. Binet said. “But not saying, ‘This is the building. I’m going to try to tell you everything about the building.’ ”

She is now based in London but was born in Switzerland, where her early pictures came out of a job at an opera house in Geneva. But photographing dancers didn’t give her much room to experiment, and she soon grew dissatisfied. When she took a picture of a dancer, she said, she was not really taking a picture of a dancer â€" it was the performance.

“And immediately, you know that you don’t know the performance,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s quite clear.”

Hélène Binet Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, Éveux, France, designed by Le Corbusier, 1953. View of a light well, photographed in 2007.

Eventually, through a friend, Ms. Binet became acquainted with a circle of architects and began to shoot, and interpret, their creations. Her first series, in 1989, of John Hejduk’s “Subject/Object” structures in Riga, Latvia, was the fruit of a lonely and exhausting process of discovery. She had no assistants, no experience photographing architecture and no formal instruction in the field, Mark Pimlott writes in an essay in the new book.

“She was alone with her subject, confronted with making architectural photographs in isolation, so was obliged to proceed instinctively, looking for both her subject and a picture,” Mr. Pimlott wrote. “The act of making photographs was bound to the process of understanding.”

Over time, Ms. Binet found an approach that suited her, one that seems less scientific or precise than one might expect. She read the architects’ books, went to their lectures and had tea with them. She was looking to synchronize sensibilities â€" so much so that she even penetrated their dreams.

After seeing one of her early images, Mr. Hejduk declared, “You’re bringing me back to the first dream I had when I did the project.”

It was early in Ms. Binet’s career, but the compliment meant a lot. It told her not only that she was getting somewhere, but that their mind-meld benefited her, too. “Even if I was not one of his students, he taught me how to look at the world,” she said.

In other chapters of the new book â€" with enigmatic titles like “Memory,” “Materiality” and “Ground” â€" Ms. Binet trains her eye on surfaces and things not made by man. Even a crack in stone can be represented in a way that explores the questions that dog her.

“The crack is really about the fascination of shifting from architecture made by man to architecture made by nature,” she said. “So the way I look at the earth, the surface, is how it’s been made.”

And she has learned to think of light as something she can wield.

“We cannot appreciate the space and the texture without the light touching it, and we cannot appreciate the light without the material,” she said. “This combination is part of a challenge and quite beautiful. They absolutely need each other.”

This echoes her early days with dancers who darted in and out of darkness. In her photo of Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba Diocesan Museum in Cologne, Germany, for example (Slide 1), natural light danced with electric light, dappling the brick and speckling the ceiling. It was a fleeting, precise moment, when the indoor and outdoor light was blending and bouncing in a single frame. She likened the elements to players in an orchestra.

Performing.

“The sense of the light, the sense of coming out of the dark, it’s something that stays very much in the way I photograph,” she said. As when she photographed dancers, she had to be quick. “There’s the dark, and then there’s the things coming out of it,” she said. “I say, ‘Oh, that’s a performance.’ Then they disappear. It’s light again.”

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