Erieta Attali

Erieta Attali is a fine art photographer specializing in landscape and architecture, whose work spans from Eurasia to Australia and the Americas. For over thirty years, she has pursued a rigorous and exacting practice, dedicated to exploring the interactions between landscape and architecture across five continents.

Through her pioneering work, she has forged a new path in architectural photography, where the traditional relationship between content and context is redefined. Her photography examines how extreme environmental conditions and challenging terrains compel humanity to adapt, reorient, and find new meaning through architectural responses. Her unconventional approach stems from a methodology deeply informed by her background in both fine art and archaeology photography.

Attali has been photographing the work of Kengo Kuma since 2002. She has collaborated with major architects worldwide, including Richard Meier and Bernard Tschumi (United States), Marc Mimran (France), Angelo Bucci (Brazil), Smiljan Radic (Chile), Glenn Murcutt (Australia), and in Japan, Kengo Kuma, Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito, Fumihiko Maki, and Sejima and Nishizawa (SANAA). 

Erieta Attali has explored the peripheries of our world: the Atacama Desert in Chile, the remote regions of Japan, the icy deserts of Norway, and the coasts of Peru. Her current photographic research focuses on the archaeological landscapes of the Ancient Island of Delos, the Aegean Sea, and the sacred spaces of medieval and contemporary Japan. She is preparing a monograph dedicated to the Felix Nussbaum Haus (Osnabrück, Germany), which houses the world’s largest collection of paintings by Felix Nussbaum. The building was designed by Daniel Libeskind in dialogue with the themes of the painter. 

Her ongoing fine art project on the island of Delos takes us to the heart of Greece. The sacred character of Delos is such that human presence has always been controlled there. To discover the unique and still unexplored essence of this inaccessible island, Erieta Attali was granted permission to spend thirty nights there over a period of two years. She used exposures of over two hours for her night shots, managing to capture the fleeting traces of light at dawn and dusk, like flashes revealing the supernatural. 

Attali is the author of several photography books and the recipient of prestigious awards. In 2024, she received the DAM Architectural Book Award for Mirror in the Mirror, co-authored with Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. This prestigious and distinctive prize was awarded by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt. Attali’s work has been exhibited in major museums worldwide and is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Chicago Athenaum Museum of Architecture and Design (USA). 

Erieta Attali was born in 1966. After studying photography at Goldsmiths, University of London, she continued as a research fellow at the School of Architecture at Columbia University in New York, as well as at Waseda University in Tokyo. She holds a PhD  from the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Selected Teaching and Residencies

Erieta Attali taught photography at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University, from 2003 to 2018, and at the National University of Singapore from 2021 to 2023. Between 2020 and 2023, she was an artist-in-residence and visiting researcher at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the Fondation Hellénique, Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris.  

Selected Photography Books and Awards

2024 – DAM Architectural Book Award - Mirror in the Mirror, co-authored with Kengo Kuma (Hartmann Books, Stuttgart)

2019-2020 – German Photo Book Award - Periphery | Archaeology of Light (Hatje Cantz, Berlin)

2019 – Marc Mimram: Structure | Light, Landscapes of Gravity Through the Lens of Erieta Attali, three-volume monograph co-authored with Marc Mimran (Hatje Cantz, Berlin)

2015 – Glass | Wood Erieta Attali on Kengo Kuma, co-authored with Kengo Kuma (Hatje Cantz, Berlin)

Academic Background and Selected Fellowships

After studying photography at Goldsmiths, University of London, Erieta Attali continued as a research fellow at the School of Architecture at Columbia University in New York with support from the Fulbright Program, and at Waseda University in Tokyo with support from the Japan Foundation. 

She holds a PhD  from the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.