The relationship with photography is more than just a pillar in Le Corbusier’s career, in his act of historically shaping his work and himself as an icon.

Indeed, at a time when the term “iconic” is being largely overused, it is worth remembering the meaning of an ionization process: the progressive replacement of a work or a subject by one, universally recognized, image. Let us just think of the now mythological mound that both enabled and determined the positioning for taking a well-known photography of the Ronchamp chapel.

As told by historian Tim Benton, the story of photographer Le Corbusier and photographed Le Corbsier sailed through several different chapters: by the beginning of the twentieth century, he himself used photography to document and communicate, even in his famous Voyage d'Orient; then he turned to an opposite radicalism, where only drawing could give shape to reality, but it was also the period of his purist villas, of the Villa Savoye, where he himself planned the views to be taken and published; then, after the war, started his relationship with Lucien Hervé, who iconized his figure in its “brutalist” phase – and consolidated his position as an artist ­– with his dramatically narrative details and contrasts of light and dark: he would use the Ronchamp mound to change the viewpoint on the chapel for a cropped picture, this time not taken from above, creating a sense of gradual approach.

In 2025, an exhibition at Fondation Le Corbusier comes to open a new chapter in the discourse: after the geometric purisms and contrasting dramas, “Looking at Le Corbusier” brings in the gaze of Emanuele Piccardo, architect, critic and photographer, who, between 2007 and 2018, has used photography to explore some of Jeanneret’s masterpieces: Ronchamp, the several Unités d'Habitation in France, the Villa Savoye, the Maisons Jaoul, the convent of La Tourette and his place of ultimate inspiration, Roquebrune-Cap Martin.

The game is set, as a dialogue between the square format of pictures and the flattening of certain famous perspectives through frontal images, where a slight inclination remains to suggest the depth. It is again a matter of interplay unfolding around details, but this time with a more evident coldness in the use of color, a rational reappraisal of Le Corbusier’s architecture.

An exploration dedicated to “those who know and love” this architecture, as Benton says, but also a new way of fulfilling what Corbu himself said in 1951, with Hervé's photographs at hand: “to show to what extent an architectural work is a perfectly homogeneous organism, in its parts as well as in its internal and external appearance.”