Ezra Stoller, the architectural
photographer who captured and shared with architects and the public alike
the life force of the Modern Movement in crisp black-and-white, died
October 29 at his home in Williamstown, Mass., following complications
of a stroke.
Born in Chicago on May 16, 1915, Stoller earned his bachelor's degree
in 1938 from the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at New York University.
During World War II, he taught photography at the Army Signal Corps Photo
Center in New York City. Two decades later, Stoller founded Esto Photographics,
the agency that has become one of the profession’s best known and
most respected houses of photography.
It
was Stoller’s architect’s eye and discipline that moved
him to capture on film the structure and spirit, body and soul of the
icons of Modern architecture, from the Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute
in La Jolla to Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York and close
to all of the great postwar buildings in between. Often, the image we
carry in our mind’s eye of any particular great building was first
seen through a lens by Ezra Stoller. He managed, in a career that spanned
more than five decades, to capture not only the architecture, but also
the times and culture embodied in each piece of work. His photos continue
to be featured in countless books and magazine articles, and in art exhibitions
worldwide.
The breadth and clarity of Stoller’s oeuvre is perhaps most beautifully
captured in Modern Architecture: Photographs
by Ezra Stoller (Harry N.
Abrams, 1990, ISBN 810938162), which features 400 of his most important
works, along with his writing about the pictures, the buildings, and
the architects who designed them. In the book, commentator William S.
Saunders concluded, “Stoller’s own strengths as a working
photographer, devoting himself for half a century with fervor and vigor,
to the achievements of others and thereby, through the very rejection
of self importance, to our surprise an indebtedness, the chief enabler
of our experiences of Modern architecture.”
Stoller received the AIA Gold Medal for Photography in 1961; he was
this prestigious award’s first recipient. And his legacy lives
on in his work, as well as in “Ezra Stoller: 50 Photos,” an
exhibition of his work on display now through December 19 at the Williams
College Museum of Art in his hometown. His daughter, Erica Stoller, continues
the legacy as director of ESTO Photographics in Mamaroneck, N.Y.
In addition to Erica, Stoller is survived by his wife, Helen; his brother,
Claude Stoller, FAIA; two sons; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
—SS
Copyright 2004 The American Institute of Architects.
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