Balthazar Korab at 100

“The story prevails in my approach to photography; the feelings, responses to a place, the message... And photography is a very important way of creating a record of the transformations experienced throughout the cultural life of a place.”
—Balthazar Korab

Talking with Balthazar Korab (1926–2013) long enough revealed a consistent pattern—one of a life and career replete with intriguing contradictions. A photographer who aspired to be a painter but instead studied architecture, he insisted on being known as “an architect who makes pictures rather than a photographer who is knowledgeable about architecture.”¹ He practiced in a field of photography dominated by large- and medium-format devices but favored the quickness and agility afforded by handheld 35 mm cameras. And though he maintained that his training in architecture provided him with the “necessary skills to understand how a building works,” on location he would often wander with an almost childlike fascination, as if he was searching for something elusive.²

His photography embodies many of these contradictions as well. While his professional images of architecture are recognized for displaying a precision befitting their modern subjects, they are often layered with the idiosyncrasies of atmosphere, weathering, and activity that confound an otherwise disciplined composition.

Celebrated widely for his images of iconic modern architecture, he often preferred to photograph vernacular buildings, industrial sites, and anonymous structures in small villages and remote towns.³ And when asked to characterize his work in a single sentence, he one simply responded, “soft-spoken with a bite.”⁴

When examined across the arc of his life and career, Korab’s oeuvre defies clear categories, or rather, it encompasses many—a fact that makes it quite difficult to identify any consistent or signature style. From the sweeping perspective of a landscape painter to the discerning candor of a documentary photographer, Korab leveraged his diverse skill set and self-taught competencies to push the medium of photography beyond its inherent limitations in attempts to more fully represent buildings, landscapes, cities, and towns as complex and dynamic subjects with complicated lives of their own. In fact, his wife and business partner Monica Korab (1930–2026) noted that Balthazar found some of his most engaging subject matter in the vernacular architecture and industrial landscapes of the United States, and his adopted home state of Michigan:

Balthazar, a perpetual foreigner in a strange land, was often more enthusiastic exploring vernacular subjects than any of his other commissioned projects, because they went beyond the architecture into a much broader expression of a particular culture. Everything was new and worth examining, and I think he saw something in America—an explosive push to build differently from his European roots, and to extend beyond our own difficult history—that was fascinating and yet unsettling in some respects.⁵

Balthazar Korab was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1926. He began his architecture education at the Budapest Polytechnic in 1945, shortly after the end of the Second World War. His time in the University coincided with the Soviet occupation of Hungary and major political upheavals which led to the unjust imprisonment of his father in 1948. Shortly after his father’s release, Korab fled the country in January 1949 with his younger brother, Antoni, and a friend from architecture school, László Peter Kollar.

He eventually made his way to Paris where he completed his architecture training at the École des Beaux-Arts (1950–1955). As a means of financially supporting himself while studying in Paris, Korab worked throughout Europe with notable architects including Le Corbusier and the Swedish firm Backström & Renius.

During his architecture training in both Budapest and, later, Paris, Korab worked fluidly between various techniques of design by turning his camera into an experimental tool for design development and visual communication. For example, when developing his final diploma project at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1955, Korab created a series of large-scale drawings combining photographic panoramas, model photography, collage, photo transfer, and photo montage.

This opportunity to experiment with the medium of photography marked a major transition in Korab’s development as both a designer and photographer that, unbeknownst to him, would prove to be critical preparation for his future professional career.

Following the completion of his architecture studies in 1955, Korab planned a move to Brazil with the goal of working for the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. In the interim, however, he and his first wife, Sally Dow, arranged for an extended visit with her family in southeast Michigan before making a more permanent move to Brazil. Shortly after their arrival to the suburbs of Detroit, Korab discovered that the office of Eero Saarinen and Associates was nearby in the town of Bloomfield Hills, so he called the firm and was granted an interview with Saarinen, to whom he presented a series of small photographic reproductions of his projects from the École. After conferring with his project manager, Kevin Roche, Saarinen offered Korab a cigar and a job with a starting wage of $2.75 per hour. Korab was asked to return after lunch that same day and immediately began working as a designer on several projects under development in the office.

However, it was Korab’s skill with a camera that quickly caught the attention of Saarinen and the senior associates in the office, and before long he was responsible for integrating photography into the firm’s design-development processes and for the documentation of their large-scale models and full-scale building mock-ups.

This working relationship proved to be mutually beneficial, as Korab’s photography became indispensable to the development of Saarinen’s most complex and technically challenging projects, and, in return, Korab acquired a deep knowledge and tacit understanding of the buildings that he would later be commissioned to photograph professionally.⁶

While Korab became fully engrossed in his role as the internal photographer for the Saarinen office, he quickly gained wider notoriety for his published images that led to an ever-growing network of reliable sources for commissions from architects and designers who had worked in the Saarinen office and had moved on to other established firms or had opened their own fledgling practices.⁷

Architects and designers such as Ralph Rapson, Harry Weese, Leonard Parker, Gunnar Birkerts, César Pelli, Jimmy Smith, Harold Tsuchiya, and Peter Carter comprised a broad network of practitioners who became instrumental in providing Korab with the necessary commissions to launch his independent photography studio in 1958.

Outside of the Saarinen contingent, many of Korab’s earliest and most consistent commissions came from other significant Michigan-based architects, most notably Minoru Yamasaki and William Kessler, both of whom were developing innovative design practices that were receiving increased publicity in leading architecture and design journals that in turn introduced Korab’s photography to a wider audience of architects, editors, and readers.⁸

For example, 1961 Korab’s image of Minoru Yamasaki’s Reynolds Metals Regional Sales Office in Southfield, Michigan won a Second Prize in the Color Section of the fourth annual AIA Photography Awards Competition for individual images.⁹

Three years later, Korab was nominated by the Michigan chapter of the AIA to represent their state in the 1964 competition for the national AIA Gold Medal for Excellence in Photography, for which he was awarded First Prize in recognition of his contributions to the worldwide coverage of prominent architecture.

By the late 1960s Korab’s reputation (and work flow) continued to grow beyond a “tight community of architects and designers,” and he became one of the most sought-after photographers by magazine editors, advertising agencies, and a network of public relations firms that populated the Detroit area and offered a broad range of assignments with subjects beyond the contemporary architecture for which he was typically hired.¹⁰

The images that he produced for these more commercially oriented commissions—industry brochures, automobile styling designers, trade publications, industrial fabrication facilities, and material manufacturers—comprise a range of portfolios in the Korab archive that represent a more nuanced and multifaceted narrative about architecture than would otherwise be revealed if only examining his images of innovative, midcentury modern designs.

In Korab’s own words, “the story prevails in my approach to photography; the feelings, responses to a place, the message.” “And photography,” he continued, “is a very important way of creating a record of the transformations experienced throughout the cultural life of a place.”¹¹ For Korab, architecture offered much more than just a static object to be idealized through the frame of a camera. Architecture embodies the material, cultural, and historical realities within which it is created, and from which it emerges.

And it was through this comprehensive understanding of architecture that he approached one of the most significant assignments of his career. After nearly forty years of practice, Korab was granted a rare opportunity to critically reflect upon the architecture of his adopted nation in a project that attained many of the critical insights espoused by photographer and critic John Szarkowski in the 1959 essay “Photographing Architecture.” In that essay, Szarkowski made a case for photography as “a technique of significant architectural criticism, capable of cohesive statements and profound insights of a new order,” arguing that “architectural photography will achieve its highest degree of clarity and intensity of meaning when the functions of cameraman, critic, and editor are combined in a single person.”¹²

The Presidential Portfolio: A Portrait of a Nation

In 1994, Korab was invited by the US State Department to curate a collection of forty images, twelve of which were personally selected by US President William (Bill) J. Clinton for a state gift for Árpád Göncz, the then-president of Hungary.¹³ Korab titled his selection “The Mark of Man on the Land” and chose images that reflected a recurring theme explored throughout his career: “the extraordinary urban development in the United States, which has occurred largely at the expense of rural life.”¹⁴ As a compilation, these twelve images represent a broad spectrum of cultural expressions that range from the nation’s agrarian roots to its rapid urban and industrial development. However, when examined more closely, these images reveal a more complex and challenging portrait of the nation.

Spanning scales that range from a sprawling city skyline to the idiosyncratic details of a one-room schoolhouse, Korab’s survey of American architecture reflects both the highest ideals of a mature urban democracy and the humble expressions of vernacular buildings and rural landscapes. And yet, many of these images are also tinged with a sense of melancholy and loss, the consequence of Korab’s critical eye and his willingness to represent the internal contradictions at the core of the nation’s contested past. “Man changes the environment for better and worse,” Korab noted, adding he lives in a place, he works, he builds, he exploits, he improves, he destroys. It’s all there.”¹⁵

For example, in his juxtaposition of vernacular buildings from the upper Midwest with the riffraff of a suburban strip, Korab presents the architecture of America’s humble agrarian roots side by side with the unchecked suburban sprawl that has displaced much of the nation’s unique architectural heritage.

Likewise, in his disciplined composition of the Oak Alley Plantation, Korab elevates the stately architectural heritage of the antebellum South while confronting viewers with the brutal realities of the enslaved laborers who were forced to build and tend to the region’s traditional buildings and iconic landscapes.

Notably, very few of the selected images featured the types of prominent midcentury modern architecture that comprised the bulk of Korab’s commissioned photography throughout his career. And in the few examples that do highlight such iconic buildings, Korab seemed intent on depicting those subjects within dynamic and complex contexts that frame their daily existence. In Gateway Arch, Korab delivered a unique perspective of Eero Saarinen’s monumental design for The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis (1947–1965). Captured from the city’s Near North Riverfront district, this view of Saarinen’s iconic archway is grounded by the dense urban fabric that formed the Mississippi River’s industrial and commercial past.

Similarly, Korab’s take on Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center (1966–1975) delivers a powerful, if conflicted, portrait of the iconic twin towers that today resonates in ways that even Korab himself could have never fully anticipated at the time he produced the image. Shot looking south down West Broadway, only three years after the development’s completion, this image projects the self-assured confidence of the financial industry rising high above the New York skyline, while also delivering a somber tribute to those who work tirelessly in many of the humble professions that undergird the financial system with which New York is often associated.

When curating his “Presidential Portfolio,” Korab could have chosen a collection of images that unambiguously celebrated the greatest achievements and heroic ideals of American culture. Instead, he chose a series of photographs that challenge the us to confront, debate, and reconcile many of the internal contradictions and enduring conflicts that complicate the nation’s ongoing experiment as a culturally diverse, modern democracy. Assembled from a position of both deep affection and critical judgment, this portfolio is a compassionate portrait of a nation by a photographer who never ceased to be captivated by the noble aspirations and sobering dilemmas of a culture so dedicated to its own perpetual remaking. Beautiful, heroic, complicated, and often contradictory, these images provoke us to reflect on ourselves, our shared history, and our collective futures.

Now, in the year of the nation’s 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence—and Korab’s 100^th birthday—Korab’s “Presidential Portfolio” presents a rare opportunity to share a small but significant cross section of his unique approach to the representation of architecture; an approach that contains frequent and sharp reminders that our built environments are always entangled in the broader cultural circumstances within which they are created and by which they are transformed. In short, the images in this portfolio are quintessential Korab: “soft-spoken with a bite.”

Although the Presidential Series marked a defining moment at the peak of Korab’s long and storied career, it was by no means the conclusion of his practice as a professional photographer. Korab maintained a vibrant studio well into the first decade of the twenty-first century, documenting projects by many of his long-term associates, friends, clients, and collaborators while also photographing the architecture of a younger generation of designers working to expand the vocabulary of modern architecture: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Michael Graves, Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Maryann Thompson and Charles Rose, Stanley Saitowitz, and Michael Van Valkenburgh, to name a few.

Later in life, Korab spent more time tending to his garden than behind a camera. And though he continued to accept commissions well into his eighties, by the end of his career he chose to work almost exclusively with his son, Christian, who is an accomplished photographer in his own right. Balthazar directed the views and framed the perspectives while Christian managed the camera and the image production.

With the recent resurgence of interest in, and reexamination of, midcentury modern design, Korab’s archive has claimed a new and crucial role in the preservation, restoration, and maintenance of aging modern architecture. His photography, which combines the exactitude of a forensic detective with the grand narrative breadth of a documentarian, provides a vast repository of source material critical for substantiating the cultural value of modern buildings under restoration and, more importantly, those at risk of demolition.¹⁶

As Korab neared the end of his life, it was most appropriate that his entire photographic archive was acquired by the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division (2011), thereby securing, for us all, the legacy of his contributions to the disciplines of architecture and photography. Now housed alongside the vast collections of photographers from previous generations, Korab’s archive will add another layer to our critical examination and thorough understanding of the designed environments that we create, inhabit, cherish, and even demolish.

With Korab’s archive now held in the public domain, this portfolio offers a small sampling from his long and storied career to help situate his photography within the broader set of circumstances from which it was produced. For while designers, educators, historians, and consumers of architecture often ascribe a calculated objectivity to the photography of built environments, it is undeniable that those images are always inflected by the particular approach that each photographer brings to bear on their subjects. What results, then, from the translation of architecture through the medium of photography amounts to differences in the sensibilities, practices, and circumstances of individual photographers. And those differences, it turns out, make all the difference.

Balthazar Korab passed away peacefully on January 15, 2013. He would have celebrated his 100^th birthday on February 16, 2026.

Notes

This biography was written based on over thirty-two hours of interviews between Balthazar Korab and the author from 1997 to 2011, unless otherwise indicated. Some additional details have been gleaned from an unpublished interview with Korab by Marlayna Schoen, transcribed in May 2001.

Korab Editions

“Balthazar Korab at 100” publishes original renderings of Balthazar Korab’s imagery made by his son, Christian Korab, who practices a unique co-authorship of his father’s photography—evolving from four decades of professional and artistic collaboration. His print making of Balthazar’s imagery serves publication, exhibition, and art collectors with aesthetic appreciation, artisanal genius, and growth of an invaluable legacy born upon his father’s vision. Please contact Korab Image about original editions of Balthazar’s photographs: imaging@korabimage.com

Acknowledgments

We extend our thanks to Christian Korab for the image production and mastering.