Markus Brunetti’s Monumental Photos Venerate European Ecclesiastical Landmarks — Colossal

For a little more than two decades, Bavarian photographer Markus Brunetti has scoured Europe for its most impressive basilicas, monasteries, duomi, and other striking ecclesiastical landmarks. Working closely with collaborator Betty Schöner, with whom he travels around the continent in a firetruck that has been converted to a photo lab, the pair snap thousands of images of each structure in meter-by-meter detail, often over the course of several years.

Through a meticulous editing process that includes layering and arranging each shot into composite images, Brunetti creates precise, high-resolution views of the facades that we never experience in real life. Perspective is skewed so that the ornate temples and cathedrals’ entrances are perfectly straight. Rather than the oblique view we usually get—think of how tall structures look when viewed from the street, with their base appearing wider and the top growing gradually narrower—we’re confronted with a striking one-point perspective.

Brunetti’s current solo exhibition, Facades IV at Yossi Milo, highlights a selection of the artist’s recent portraits, several of which were completed in the last couple of years. “Roma, Basilica di San Pietro,” for example, was initiated in 2007. “Brunetti and Schöner returned to St. Peter’s Basilica seven times over nineteen years,” the gallery says. “With each survey, they grew closer to realizing this grand image—a particular challenge given that it is one of the largest and most visited churches in the world.”

Printed at an impressively large scale—up to seven-and-a-half feet tall—the photos venerate these buildings, many of which are centuries old. “The result exceeds the possibilities of any single photograph, even at the highest possible resolution, creating works that stand as monuments in and of themselves,” the gallery says.

Facades IV continues through June 20 in New York City.