DneproGES Dam and Power Station, Zaporozhe, 1999, Built 1927-1932. Architects: Aleksandr Vesnin, Nikolai Kolli, Georgui Orlov, and Sergei Andrievsky. All photographs are chromogenic color prints, courtesy of the artist.

Richard Pare is a great storyteller, blessed with that felicitous fluency of tongue so many British happily possess. One story in particular caught me. It was about how, on a summer evening when Pare was about eight years old and an apprentice chorister at Canterbury, he was sent to retrieve some papers from the treasury. With an antique key to a side door, the boy let himself into the vast and darkening cathedral where, to his surprise, he discovered a full orchestra performance of Verdi’s Requiem being conducted in the nave. As he passed through the south transept, the music for the Tuba Mirum began to swell. Rooted to the spot, alone in the shadows, Pare listened for what seemed like hours as the spectacular tones of the Dies Irae resonated against carved stone.

It’s a memory that gives him goose bumps to this day. And so it was that Richard Pare, who spent days of his childhood as a choirboy practicing to make sounds big enough to fill a cavernous church building, associated architecture with music at an early age.

And so it was that when I first saw the Shabolovka Radio Tower in the cover shot for Pare’s new book, The Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–1932 (Monacelli, 2007), I thought: “Oh! Mozart!”

There is a drama to the rhythm and fluidity of composition in Pare’s mature images that is undeniably melodic and often, truthfully, more beautiful than the structures they represent. So for a while I was puzzled that MoMA was planning to exhibit these lyrical photographs as architectural renderings rather than as—simply art. (The Lost Vanguard, an exhibition in conjunction with the book, runs through October.) Until, that is, Sarah Hermanson (in MoMA’s Department of Photography) sensibly explained that there is no law forbidding architectural photography from also being art, and Barry Bergdoll pointed out to me that their subject was not only completely architectural but also historically specific to a very narrow span of years. And now that, thanks to Pare, I know something about the Russian modernist architects and the fleeting, hopeful, and romantic dream their buildings represent, I cannot imagine another photographer better suited to his chosen project.

When I asked Pare about his heroes, he answered: Walker Evans for the razor sharpness of his vision, and Robert Frank for his humanity (which also implies that the character of the photographer can permeate his photographic work). And all during our several conversations I was reminded of C. S. Lewis’s famous comment that it’s usually the worst grown-ups who are the most adult, because, in opposition, it’s so easy to imagine Pare, with his shock of slightly untidy hair and his round, light eyes, as the schoolboy he once was; particularly since he retains an earnestness, a sense of wonder and adventure and a simple joy in what he’s doing that, for me, visibly infuses everything he makes.

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Issue 101 Fall 2007