Lucien Hervé

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Lucien Hervé (b. László Elkán) is a French-Hungarian photographer well known for his black and white photos of architecture. He was born in the city of Vasarely in Hungary on August 7, 1910, but came to Paris in 1929 and earned French citizenship in 1938. During World War II he was captured by the Germans (at the Battle of Dunkirk), escaped, and became a member of the French Resistance under the name Lucien Hervé which he kept thereafter.

He is most famous for his collaboration with the architect Le Corbusier from 1949 to the architect's death in 1965. His black and white photos of Le Corbusier's buildings -- with their strong lights, shadows, and monumental sense of space -- are perhaps the most well known images of the architect's work. He has also worked with the architects Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, Kenzo Tange, Richard Neutra, Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Prouvé, Bernard Zerfuss, and others.

Lucien Hervé has also explored photographic abstraction and collage.

Since the late 1980s, Hervé's work has enjoyed a renewed popularity. In 2000, he showed color works of his apartment at the gallery of fashion designer Agnès b.