“Sacred buildings represent the culture of the time in which they were built, which is what fascinates me about the facades of European churches.”
—Markus Brunetti
German artist Markus Brunetti (b.1965) approaches documenting architecture by pushing the boundaries of photographic scale, intricacy and precision. Since 2005, Brunetti and Betty Schöner, his partner, have been travelling around Europe in their ‘expedition truck’ (a mobile computer lab), where they live and work while meticulously documenting religious sites for his series Facades. His painstaking image-making process entails photographing the facade one square metre at a time from a fixed place, stitching up to 2,000 images together and removing all signs of modern life. ‘When capturing, I deconstruct the facades to the smallest unit’ explains Brunetti ‘and when mounting the large image on our computer screens, we put these small details back into the big picture.’ As seen in the present work, the ensuing image is a monumental, precisely detailed view of the facade with a compressed perspective similar to that of architectural drawing. Here, we see Brunetti’s enthralling depiction of the resplendent Cathedral of Notre Dame in Reims, France, which was the coronation site of 25 kings of France between 1223 and 1825. Brunetti’s works reside in numerous institutions, including the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Locle, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.
