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Lucien Clergue photographed Brasília in 1962–63, only a few years after Brazil’s new capital had been built. This book brings those architectural images together for the first time. Long believed lost, the photographs record Clergue’s immediate response to a city conceived on an exceptional scale, when its modernist identity still carried the force of a recent proposition rather than that of an established monument.

Developed from 1956, Brasília joined Lúcio Costa’s urban plan, Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture, and Roberto Burle Marx’s landscape design in a comprehensive vision of metropolitan life. Clergue concentrates largely on an unpeopled city. Human activity recedes, allowing façades, columns, open ground, and sweeping profiles to assume the principal roles. His framing gives particular emphasis to Niemeyer’s upward curves and to the expanses surrounding the buildings, balancing sculptural drama with an atmosphere of cool restraint.

These photographs also extend the understanding of a photographer more commonly associated with the landscapes and cultural life of southern France, bullfighting, and the nude. The play of light that distinguished those subjects is redirected here toward concrete, volume, and civic space. Rather than treating architecture as neutral documentation, Clergue responds to its rhythm and sensuality: structures become sequences of arcs, planes, shadows, and intervals, while the relative absence of crowds preserves the city’s early, almost abstract presence.

Published by Hatje Cantz in 2013 as a 176-page hardcover, Lucien Clergue: Brasília occupies a precise place in collections concerned with architectural photography, postwar modernism, and representations of planned cities. Its significance rests not on retrospective mythmaking but on the historical proximity of the images to Brasília’s construction and on the recovery of a previously unavailable body of work. The volume offers both a concentrated study of a defining modernist capital and an important expansion of Clergue’s photographic range.