EZRA STOLLER was the American architectural photographer whose memorable photographs of buildings by the 20th century’s leading designers popularised architecture for a whole generation. His striking black and white photographs, which are among the world’s most frequently reproduced architectural images, played a key role in the shaping of public perceptions of modern architecture.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Kenzo Tange and many others turned to Stoller to capture their buildings on film, and Philip Johnson once said that no modern building was complete until it had been “Stollerised”, or photographed by Stoller.

From the point of view of architects, Stoller’s appeal was twofold. He prepared his shoots with meticulous, painstaking detail, often visiting the site several times before photographing the building, to observe how the light affected it at different times of the day. His photographs were graphically powerful, with sharp contrasts between light and shadow. After years of observation, he knew how shade could best illustrate the form of a building while shadow could reveal its texture. He spent hours investigating the best angles from which to shoot, often drawing his own diagrams of the site to ensure he placed his large format camera in precisely the right spot from which to capture the finest essence of the building.

His photograph of the Dulles Airport terminal in Virginia, by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, is a classic example of his brilliant graphic conception. The building is photographed from a lazily curving road, beneath a sky of scudding high cloud, at that mysterious dusk hour, when the sky retains a glowing, highlighting quality. The terminal lights illuminate the sweeping bones of the building from below, turning them into the wings of a bird in flight, while the navigation tower stands sentinel at the side, its top ringed with a necklace of lights.

But perhaps more important to architects was the fact that Stoller had been trained at architecture school, where he had absorbed the lessons of Vitruvius. Buildings clearly interested him on an intellectual level as well as a visual level.

Stoller was born in 1915 in Chicago. As a young man, he was interested in mechanical drawing and it was while studying for his degree in industrial design at New York University that he took up photography. In the early 1940s, he worked for the photogra-pher Paul Strand in the Office of Emergency Management, and then when America entered the war, Stoller was drafted into the Army and taught photography at the Army Signal Corps Photo Centre in New York.

After the war, Stoller specialised in the photography of buildings, and built up a reputation for himself as one of the sharpest interpreters on film of the built environment. His success rested on his ability to persuade the viewer to understand the aesthetic of the space he was depicting. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Stoller photographed many of the most famous buildings in America, and several abroad, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, Mies van der Rohe’ s Seagram Building in New York, Richard Meier’s Athenaeum Building, and Kenzo Tange’s Kagawa Prefecture Building. He was so fascinated by Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla that he shot it without a commission.

Just as Renaissance artists commissioned the best engravers to make copies of their paintings, in order to spread their fame, so too architects of the 20th century came to value collaboration with photographers sympathetic to their work. With journals, magazines and books playing an ever more important role in bringing an architect’s work to the attention of professional colleagues, patrons and the public, architects needed good and flattering photographs for publicity and promotional purposes.

But while Lucien Hervé and Claude Gravot were closely controlled and supervised in the photographs they took of Le Corbusier’s buildings, and Edward Weston and Julius Shulman worked in close collaboration with Richard Neutra, Stoller remained independent, despite the best efforts of Frank Lloyd Wright to hire him as an exclusive photographer.

Stoller was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ gold medal in 1961, the first photographer to be so honoured. He founded the Esto photography agency, which represents Stoller’s work as well as that of other leading architectural photographers such as Andrew Wainwright and Richard Einzig.

Many people only know of particular buildings through photographs, and the timelessness and elegance of Stoller’s work brought him a constant flow of varied commissions. His photographic magic was so compelling that architects and students were often disappointed when they finally came to see the real building in the flesh.

Ezra Stoller, architectural photographer, was born on May 16, 1915, He died on October 29, 2004, aged 89.