Luisa Lambri

Luisa Lambri is a photographer who has devoted herself almost exclusively to architecture as her primary subject matter, and has dedicated several series of work to some of the greatest masters of Modernism (Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Giuseppe Terragni and Phillip Johnson).

Her photographs are not just documentations of the buildings but have clean and objective qualities that are enhanced by an intimate emotional reading of place. By placing herself and the viewer within the mostly domestic architecture, Lambri proposes a more personal recording of the building’s atmosphere, her experience of the space and her developing relationship to it. Her works alternate between empirical representation and abstract subjectivity. Combining traditional means and new digital techniques in order to further remove her work from the pure documentary, the digital adjustments appear invisible yet are fundamental to her practice.

For her series for MADE UP entitled Untitled (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporânea, #05) (2008), Lambri photographed buildings by Alvaro Siza in Portugal and Spain. She saw the architecture as essentially pure, and primarily about the sense of time as a material more prominent than any other. This observation allowed her to further reveal her preoccupations on the temporal through her intricate manipulations. Her images pared down to explorations of light and shadow, the passage of time as each change signaled a movement in time and the series of emotions that she shared with the space.

Untitled (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporânea, #05), 2008
Collection of photographs
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2008 in association with Thomas Dane Gallery, London
Exhibited at Tate Liverpool