Painstakingly Assembled Images of Sacred Spaces

In this weekly series, T’s photo editors share the most compelling visual projects they’ve discovered.

The German photographer Markus Brunetti doesn’t have a home. For the past 10 years, he has been traveling through Western Europe in a truck with his partner, Betty Schoener, photographing the facades of churches, cathedrals and cloisters in minute detail. His process is exhaustive — he spends weeks or even years shooting each facade from top to bottom, capturing every finial, gable and gargoyle from street level. The hundreds or even thousands of resulting frames are then assembled digitally, an editing process that often takes longer than the photography itself. The resulting body of work is a collection of hyper-realistic facades, specimens to be examined and compared. Studying the details, Brunetti says, is “like reading a very good book.” Brunetti is drawn to sacred buildings because they are often the only remaining ones that preserve a city’s cultural history. A selection of these images will be on view at Yossi Milo gallery in New York this September, some printed at a whopping 10 feet tall. Meanwhile, Brunetti and Schoener plan to continue on to the Baltic States and Eastern Europe. “Living and working in our truck lets us feel at home almost everywhere,” Brunetti says.