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California Captured – The Salk Institute
Marvin Rand was California's most inconspicuous photographer - but he defined its architectural iconography
How would you photograph a building? Most of us, when presented with the clean lines of somewhere such as the Taj Mahal or the Capitol in Washington DC, would centre the building, producing a symmetrical, serviceable, though slightly dull representation of it.
Most of us, however, aren’t anything like as talented as the great 20th-century Californian photographer Marvin Rand. Rand was born in Los Angeles in 1924, and specialised in mid-century architecture.
![The Salk Institute by Louis Kahn, as photographed by Marvin Rand](/resource/salkcaliforniacapturedrand1.jpg)
He was a subtle, unassuming, highly skilled photographer, and his pictures are a great way to understand the extent to which modernity took hold in California in the Fifties. We've meticulously sifted through Rand's extensive archive and published a great deal of it in a new book, California Captured Mid-Century Modern Architecture, Marvin Rand.
![The Salk Institute by Louis Kahn, as photographed by Marvin Rand](/resource/salkcaliforniacaptured.jpg)
When he came to photograph Louis Kahn’s 1965 masterpiece, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a beautiful marble research centre on the southern tip of the Californian coastline, he skipped the obvious Sunday snapper viewpoint for a deeper, more engaging take on the building. Here’s how we describe it in our new book.
![Marvin Rand photographed by Kaku Alston in 2004 as featured in our new book](/resource/marvin.jpg)
“An instant classic in the architecture world, the Salk Institute in La Jolla is one of the most photographed buildings in twentieth-century history. While most of the classic images of this complex show the line of water fading toward the vanishing point over the Pacific Ocean, Marvin Rand took a different approach, illustrating the sectional complexities of this structure and the sculptural articulation of the building as it descends towards the ocean.
![California Captured](/resource/9780714876115.jpg)
“A living room of travertine with seating and a grand gesture of water cascading into a lower pond add to the magical stillness of Louis Kahn’s pristine design, under a unique California light.”
For more beautiful takes on beautiful buildings check out California Captured Mid-Century Modern Architecture, Marvin Rand in the store.