Bio

BIO / PORTFOLIO

Ezra Stoller was born in Chicago in 1915, grew up in New York and studied architecture at NYU. As a student, he began photographing buildings, models and sculpture; in 1938, he graduated with a BFA in Industrial Design. In 1940-1941, Stoller worked with the photographer Paul Strand in the Office of Emergency Management; he was drafted in 1942 and was a photographer at the Army Signal Corps Photo Center. After World War II, Stoller continued his career as an architectural photographer and also focused on industrial and scientific commissions. Over the next forty years, he became best known for images of buildings.

He worked from the late 1930s into the 1980s. Stoller’s images convey the three-dimensional experience of architecture through a two-dimensional medium with careful attention to vantage point and lighting conditions as well as line, color, form and texture. Among the iconic structures he photographed are Fallingwater, the Guggenheim Museum, the Seagram Building, and the TWA Terminal. Often the images are as familiar as the buildings they document. Ezra Stoller’s work included photographs of science and technology, factories and industrial production plus commercial and residential architecture. His work can be seen as social history as well as documents of design and construction.

Many modern buildings are recognized and remembered by the images Stoller created as he was uniquely able to visualize the formal and spatial aspirations of Modern architecture. During his long career as an architectural photographer, Stoller worked closely with many of the period’s leading architects including Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei, Gordon Bunshaft, Eero Saarinen, Richard Meier and Mies van der Rohe, among others. Stoller died in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2004. Read the New York Times obituary here.

HONORS & AWARDS

Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, Pratt Institute, 1998.

The American Institute of Architects Award for Architectural Photography, 1961.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, Moscow, 2019

Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, 2011, 2013, 2017

Danziger Projects, New York, 2007

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown MA, 2004

Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, 2002, 2004

Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery, New York, 2001

Rolf Ricke Gallery, Cologne, 2000

James Danziger Gallery, New York, 1998, 1999

Max Protetch Gallery, New York, 1980

COLLECTIONS

Stoller’s work is numerous collections including the Addison Museum, Canadian Centre for Architecture, High Art Museum, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Modern Art New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Williams College Museum of Art and in private collections.

Ezra Stoller’s limited edition fine art prints are represented exclusively by Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, while Esto licenses usage rights for reproduction.

PUBLICATIONS

Ezra Stoller : Photographer of Modern American Architecture by Pierluigi Serraino, Phaidon, October 2019

Ezra Stoller Photographer by Nina Rappaport and Erica Stoller, Yale University Press, 2012

Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller by William Saunders, Harry N Abrams, 1990, 1997

“Building Blocks” Series, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999: Chapel at Ronchamp; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West; Salk Institute; Seagram Building; TWA Terminal; United Nations; Yale Art + Architecture Building. 2000: John Hancock Center; Whitney Museum of American Art, 2000

Guggenheim New York/Guggenheim Bilbao, Ezra Stoller and Jeff Goldberg, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999

Stoller’s photographs are published in countless books and magazines