"Hélène Binet is one of the world's finest architectural photographers. Yet she does not document buildings, aim to ingratiate herself with architects and art editors, or even seek to flatter the works of personal favourites such as Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Peter Zumthor. She responds to buildings with the eye of an artist, her brush a large-format camera, her canvas a hand-crafted black-and-white print.
In some of the most inspiring European buildings of recent years, she has found her subject: the play of light and shadow in architectural space. Her numinous prints are things of depth and beauty, and now some 20 of them are on show at London's Shine Gallery. What makes them so special is that they capture the dream life of, say, Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin or Hadid's fire station for Vitra at Weil am Rhein. Architecture is nearly always - and rightly - compromised as a pure art by its functional role, by the demands of its inhabitants and visitors. The soulful Jewish Museum, for instance, has lost some of its mystery and magic now that it has been kitted out with a questionable tableau of Berlin's Jewish history. Binet's images of this highly charged building are the ones we will always want to know it by. Her Jewish Museum, if you like, is the one Libeskind always had in mind. Her images have become the building's guardian angels….
…Because Binet concentrates on details or specific areas of buildings and on the play of light and shadow, her architectural imagery is never treacherous. How often have you cherished an image of a building only to be disappointed by the real thing? It might be surrounded by second-rate housing or overshadowed by a motorway intersection. It might just be a lesser work of art than you had imagined; let's face it, you have been seduced by the art of the photographer. Binet's photographs, however, are not tourist bait: they are, like all great images, ends in themselves…"
Jonathan Glancey