Facades

For over ten years, Markus Brunetti and his partner Betty Schöner have been travelling across Europe to photograph the facades of cathedrals and churches. He reveals the architecture of these sacred buildings, whether gothic, romanesque or baroque, in minute detail. Brunetti photographs each fragment like a high definition scanner, a technique that enables him later to bring all his images together in a coherent, digital whole. His mind-boggling and titanic methods go way beyond our usual ideas of photography. The process is intrinsically long and fastidious – Brunetti can work on the same facade for many weeks or even months – because the ultimate aim is always to recreate the architectural riches of a given building through multiples pieces of a deconstructed puzzle. This creates a unique portrait of these churches. The resulting large format prints are more akin to the architects’ original plans – although these never existed – than to traditional monumental photography. The viewer is confronted with a new vision, surprising, enigmatic and, above all, fascinating.