Lucien Hervé is the most important figure in the genre of architectural photography and the creator of its modern form. He was born László Elkán in 1910, in the Hungarian city of Hódmezővásárhely. He was 18 when he left his native country and, after a brief detour in Vienna, settled in Paris. There he worked in a bank all the way up to 1939, when he began to write and take photographs for a magazine. During the war, he took on the alias Hervé. Later on he would become world-famous using this name as his pseudonym.
In 1949 he met Le Corbusier, who upon seeing the photos Hervé had taken of the architect's Marseilles housing block, then under construction, invited him to be his regular photographer. From that point on, Hervé systematically photographed Le Corbusier's buildings, as well as the works of other architects, including the likewise Hungarian-born Marcell Breuer's UNESCO headquarters in Paris (designers: Marcel Breuer, Nervi, Bernard and Zehrfuss). His photographs are constructed around the contrast of light and shadow, and he cropped them to make them boldly and radically geometric - and free of any documentary character. Le Corbusier said that he himself got to know his buildings better through them. Unlike his contemporaries, Hervé eschewed anecdotal genre pictures, instead choosing austere, geometrically constructed compositions as his expressive medium, which led to the art of Mondrian and the Constructivists.


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