By Samuel Stone

The first thing one notices in the architectural photography of Ezra Stoller is the sheer angularity of the compositions. Indeed, if there’s a common thread that runs throughout the body of work compiled in Pierluigi Serraino’s Photographic History of Modern American Architecture, it is that angularity. This rigid, often fractal geometry in Stoller’s images invites us to consider not only the harmony of the mathematical relationships inscribed therein, but the dissonance of those mathematical forms in the context of their greater environment.

The simultaneous attention that Stoller pays to both the stern rigidity and the soaring motion of his subjects belies the technical precision of an engineer who is plagued with the heart of an artist. Thus, it is no surprise to learn that Stoller was a student of architecture at New York University before he began to explore his passion for photography after graduating in 1938. It is Serraino’s project in this beautiful, primarily black-and-white anthology to render a “pictorial history of twentieth-century Modern American architecture”. But it is also his goal to excavate from forgotten archives a body of original and visually striking photography largely unknown to the very culture that reveres its progenitor (similarly, much of Stoller’s project consists in preserving the work of great and innovative architects who were “ultimately left out of history’s exclusive and enduring circle of household names”).

The majority of photographs in this collection depict, from both internal and external perspectives, the architecture of the modernist movement as it exploded in popularity in the United States after the Second World War: family homes, parking structures, university buildings, various industrial centers and factories, car dealerships, research laboratories, airports, government complexes, art galleries, museums, and my personal favorite, skyscrapers. Only rarely do human subjects appear in Stoller’s work, and when they do, they are dwarfed by the staggering intransigence of the physical structures imposed on an otherwise frivolous environment.

The architecture, and Stoller’s photographic rendition of it, tend toward a rejection of frivolity for the sake of functionality, a dismissal of lyricism for the sake of command—no doubt, lynchpins of the modernist architectural movement affected in response to the instability, uncertainty, and sheer chaos wrought by the most destructive violent conflicts in history: the first mechanized wars. Even in the instances of the more playful structures, their playfulness seems only to exist as a consequence of their authority over the environment. They’re not playful for the sake of playfulness, but rather, for the sake of showing that they can do whatever they want.

Nevertheless, there is something deeply poetic to be discovered in Stoller’s work—a sense of quiet yearning to break free from the rigidity that has been imposed on the environment, a yearning which exists in perpetual tension with a reverence for the formal perfection of that rigidity. We know at heart that we are freer than these forms, and it is this radical freedom that gives way to all our imperfection. Perhaps this is precisely why we’re subject to captivation by their beauty.

Ezra Stoller: A Photographic History of Modern American Architecture can be purchased here, and more of Stoller’s work can be viewed here.