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Lucien Hervé 呂西安．埃爾韋
High Court, Chandigarh, India 印度昌迪加爾高等法院
1955
In 1955, the Hungarian-born, Paris-based photographer Lucien Hervé accompanied the architect Le Corbusier to India, documenting the Corbusier-designed complexes under construction in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad in thousands of photographs. The two first met in 1949, when Hervé sent Le Corbusier more than six hundred photographs of the architect’s Unité d’habitation housing complex in Marseille—which he had taken in a single day. Le Corbusier replied that the photographer had ‘the soul of an architect’, and Hervé proceeded to work as Le Corbusier’s official photographer until the architect’s death in 1965.
Hervé studied economics and fine arts in Vienna and worked in Paris fashion houses in the 1930s, alongside an active involvement in labour politics. After the Second World War, he turned to arts journalism and photography; largely self-taught in the medium, his prolificacy ensured it would be his enduring legacy. Hervé’s images of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh and Ahmedabad buildings helped define the international image of a modern, independent India. His keen eye for textures and details emphasises the muscular concrete construction and radical forms of the government buildings. In this photograph of the High Court in Chandigarh, Hervé focuses on a figure crouching before a retaining wall in the foreground, with the geometric structure of the court’s facade receding into the distance. The composition prevents the viewer from taking in the entire building at once, underscoring the massive scale of India’s new architectural undertakings.
Hervé studied economics and fine arts in Vienna and worked in Paris fashion houses in the 1930s, alongside an active involvement in labour politics. After the Second World War, he turned to arts journalism and photography; largely self-taught in the medium, his prolificacy ensured it would be his enduring legacy. Hervé’s images of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh and Ahmedabad buildings helped define the international image of a modern, independent India. His keen eye for textures and details emphasises the muscular concrete construction and radical forms of the government buildings. In this photograph of the High Court in Chandigarh, Hervé focuses on a figure crouching before a retaining wall in the foreground, with the geometric structure of the court’s facade receding into the distance. The composition prevents the viewer from taking in the entire building at once, underscoring the massive scale of India’s new architectural undertakings.
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