Ezra Stoller

This gallery’s third exhibition by the late architectural photographer Ezra Stoller comprises twenty images of New York’s iconic modernist landmarks. Three bilaterally symmetrical studies of the exterior of Eero Saarinen’s 1962 TWA Terminal at JFK Airport, each a magnificent study of light, tame the building’s swooping curves, setting up the dramatic reversal offered by Stoller’s iconic picture of the terminal’s quasi-Rococo interior. Two prints grant amateur sleuths an opportunity to play connect-the-dots with the local landscape: An image of Gordon Bunshaft’s 1952 Lever House is marked by the corner of a stone building that creeps into the right side of the frame, while a later nighttime photograph of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson’s Seagram Building, which replaced this stone structure, seems to have been taken from the Lever House’s third-floor terrace. Both are magnificent pictures—especially the latter, with the tower’s grid of lit-up windows ascending beyond the frame. To cite just one example of Stoller’s pervasive influence: A later photographer, taking a picture to illustrate Herbert Muschamp’s New York Times article dubbing the Seagram Building the “Building of the Millennium,” precisely (if unconsciously) copied a Stoller image included here. A testament to his fastidiousness, Stoller’s images transcend without abandoning their illustrative function.