Picturing Places and Spaces

Balthazar Korab is best known as an architectural photographer, but the Stamelos collection owns a landscape that he captured in Montichiello, Tuscany during a sabbatical. During his two-year stay in Italy, Korab shot a cityscape series taken from high vantage points in Rome, and he chose the same perspective for this hilly landscape between Rome and Florence. In these photographs, Korab eliminates most of the sky and frames the scene as an arrangement of forms within a narrow tonal range. A golden shaft of light illuminates the leafy tree and a slice of a valley in the lower section of the photograph. Beyond this area, fields and the slope of a steep hill are barely visible in dim light that only differentiates the varying textures of a forested area to the left and a furrowed field possibly with a dusting of snow or frost to the right. Along the ridge of this hill, a path climbs to the cluster of buildings in the upper right corner. These structures are a reminder of those who worked the land, but their white walls also balance the highlighted tree in the lower left corner. Beyond the ridge, atmospheric perspective transforms the distant hills and valleys into curving swaths of light blue-gray color.

Korab was born in Budapest, Hungary and attended the city's architecture school, the Polytechnicum. Due to Soviet repression following World War II, Korab and his brother fled to Austria in 1948. They found refuge in the American General Consulate's private villa on the outskirts of Vienna. His American contact helped him find a job in a photography lab operated by the U.S. Army division. In 1951 Korab moved to Paris to enroll in the École des Beaux-Arts, and later he worked in the studio of Le Corbusier. He met his first wife, a Michigan native, in France. In the mid 1950s while visiting her parents, Korab was offered a position in Eero Saarinen's Detroit office where he first worked as a designer but later became the lead photographer. At the same time, Korab worked as a freelance photographer and eventually established his own studio. In addition to photographing works designed by Eero Saarinen and Associates, he shot images of architecture designed by important modern and postmodern architects such as Mies van der Rohe, William Kessler, Minoru Yamasaki, Richard Meier, and Louis Kahn.