Woodscapes - Erieta Attali on Kengo Kuma

The photographic exhibition of the internationally acclaimed and award-winning Greek-Israeli architectural and landscape photographer Erieta Attali, "Woodscapes / Erieta Attali on Kengo Kuma", will be presented at the Byzantine & Christian Museum until Tuesday 31 October, 2023.


The exhibition focuses on the wooden architectural structures by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, found scattered from the most remote parts of Japan to the centre of Paris. Erieta Attali’s photographic projects develop over long committed years and through many, many images. Yet for this exhibition she has distilled the profound dialogue she entertains with architecture into a selection of fifteen photographs. These are images of layered perceptions that capture the very essence of her approach to architecture and photography as complementary experiences of shifting opticality. Unlike commercial photography produced on deadline to document a recently competed building captured as a designed object, Attali’s art is born of a sustained relationship with the entire body of work of a single designer attempting always to capture the very essence of the atmospheres that recur from work to work. Of the handful of relationships that Attali has honed in well over a quarter century as a photographer, none has been more reciprocal than that with the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. For the melding of designed space and environment is the objective of both architect and photographer. In his combinations of the engineering feat of huge planes of glass with innovative interpretations of traditional Japanese wooden architecture, Kengo crafts spaces that fluctuate visually and experientially in the changing valences of natural settings. His works have an almost preternatural resonance with Attali’s photographic practice. Through the glass lenses of her analog cameras she seeks to capture the interpenetration of found and manmade environments, merging hard and reflected surfaces into layered images that record atmosphere as the very substance of the art of Kuma’s architecture.