Bernd & Hilla Becher

Both as artists and teachers, Bernhard and Hilla Becher are among the most important figures in postwar German photography. For the last thirty years, the artists have examined the dilapidated industrial architecture of Europe and North America, from water towers and blast furnaces to the surrounding workers' houses. Photographing against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, the artists treat these forgotten structures as the exotic specimens of a long-dead species.

Influenced by the formal rigor and conceptual methods of pre–World War II artists, such as August Sander and Walker Evans, Bernd and Hilla Becher were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors, such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. They treated their subject matter—the disappearing industrial architecture of the West—as “anonymous sculpture.” Here, a fabulous tower used to cool water at the Mont Cenis colliery rises from the ground like a modernist top hat made for a wooden giant. In 1978, just thirteen years after the Bechers visited the busy complex, it closed permanently, ending more than one hundred years of coal extraction on the site.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are the most important figures in European photography since 1950. Influenced by the formal rigor and typological method of prewar artists such as August Sander and Walker Evans, they were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt and paved the way for the medium’s integration into the broader arena of contemporary art. As professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, their influence was paramount on the celebrated generation of photographers known as the “Düsseldorf School” such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

The Bechers photographed against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, using an old-fashioned tripod-mounted view camera of the kind used by Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. They treated their subjects as “anonymous sculpture” (the name of their first monograph) that could only be fully rendered through either multiple views from different perspectives or more often, through the typological accumulation and serial presentation of multiple specimens. Although they were artists not scientists, the Bechers used an almost Linnean system of classification—another important 19th century precedent which they made resolutely modern.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bernd and Hilla Becher completed a thorough documentation of the many gravel plants in and near Günzburg, a small city on the Danube River in Bavaria. This oddly shaped yet functional building was used as a stone breaker to produce gravel, the still-lucrative industrial material required for making roads and high-quality concrete. The asymmetrical facade delights the eye, recalling the Bechers’ frequently stated agenda: “We were fascinated above all by the shape of technical architecture, and hardly by its history.”

The buildings Bernd and Hilla Becher chose to photograph were meant to be altered or demolished when superseded technologically. Given the planned obsolescence of their subjects, the artists’ timing played an important role in the success of their practice. In one of their last books, Industrial Landscapes (2002), they commented: “Once we were in northern France, where we found a wonderful headgear [the top of a blast furnace]—a veritable Eiffel Tower. When we arrived the weather was hazy and not ideal for our work so we decided to postpone taking the photos for a day. When we arrived the next day, it had already been torn down, the dust was in the air.”

Lime, an important building material since ancient times, is used in the production of mortar and cement. Here, the Bechers focused their attention on six towering brick chimneys that look as much like sprouting asparagus as utilitarian structures. The artists chose a similar view of lime kilns for the cover image of Anonyme Skulpturen (1970), their ambitious first publication. The book presents comparative sequences of different industrial forms, from kilns and gasometers to cooling towers, blast furnaces, and winding towers.

The Bechers’ iconic photographs of winding towers (also known as mineheads) are among their works most coveted by public institutions and private collectors alike. For some, the appeal is the form’s expressive beauty and clear function; for others, it is the typographic quality of the structures and the dignified way the towers are fixed to the ground upon which they sit and do their work. The Bechers made this photograph in South Wales on a travel grant sponsored by the British Council to provide a visual anthology of Welsh coal mining at a time when the National Coal Board was shutting down collieries across the United Kingdom. Glenrhondda opened in 1911 and closed in 1966, around the time they made this picture.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are the most important figures in European photography since 1950. Influenced by the formal rigor and typological method of prewar artists such as August Sander and Walker Evans, they were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt and paved the way for the medium’s integration into the broader arena of contemporary art. As professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, their influence was paramount on the celebrated generation of photographers known as the “Düsseldorf School” such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

The Bechers photographed against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, using an old-fashioned tripod-mounted view camera of the kind used by Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. They treated their subjects as “anonymous sculpture” (the name of their first monograph) that could only be fully rendered through either multiple views from different perspectives or more often, through the typological accumulation and serial presentation of multiple specimens. Although they were artists not scientists, the Bechers used an almost Linnean system of classification—another important 19th century precedent which they made resolutely modern.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are the most important figures in European photography since 1950. Influenced by the formal rigor and typological method of prewar artists such as August Sander and Walker Evans, they were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt and paved the way for the medium’s integration into the broader arena of contemporary art. As professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, their influence was paramount on the celebrated generation of photographers known as the “Düsseldorf School” such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

The Bechers photographed against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, using an old-fashioned tripod-mounted view camera of the kind used by Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. They treated their subjects as “anonymous sculpture” (the name of their first monograph) that could only be fully rendered through either multiple views from different perspectives or more often, through the typological accumulation and serial presentation of multiple specimens. Although they were artists not scientists, the Bechers used an almost Linnean system of classification—another important 19th century precedent which they made resolutely modern.

Bernd and Hilla Becher found artistic inspiration in the underappreciated beauty of the built environment, specifically, commonplace industrial and residential architecture. The Bechers’ use of typological ordering, as seen here in a grid of fifteen framework-house studies, can be traced to Hilla’s interest in the concepts of taxonomy and morphology, which are systems of biological classification based on shape and function. They called their assemblages “typologies” and used this effective graphic structure to compare similar and different forms, as would a researcher studying a collection of fossils or butterflies.

The Bechers subdivided their framework-house photographs into families of like forms to create their typologies. Their book Framework Houses of the Siegen Industrial Region presents seven discrete chapters: Gable Sides; Slated Gable Sides (seen here); Street and Rear Sides; Slated Street and Rear Sides; Corner Views; Houses from Different Views; and Groups of Houses. They noted that the use of slate on a house’s exterior “was desirable because it provides insulation against humidity and eliminated periodic painting. But since it was expensive, slating was often restricted to the waterside or just the gable, which was difficult to paint because of its height.”

This unique diptych represents an important step in the Bechers' development of the gridded typology form. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the artists experimented with a number of formats exemplifying the comparative technique that their rigorous archival method (standardizing their work formally and compositionally) made possible. Only two or three other diptychs of this "one-and-nine" format (such as gas tanks) have been seen in records of auction results but never available for acquisition. The Bechers' entire project rests on the differential nature of their system, i.e. only in multiple variants presented side by side can an "ideal" form or archetype be created in the mind of the viewer. Although coincidental, the German sociological pairing of gemeineschaft (social relations via personal ties) and gesellschaft (social relations via impersonal ties) seems especially appropriate to the conceptual organization presented here by the artists.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are the most important figures in European photography since 1950. Influenced by the formal rigor and typological method of prewar artists such as August Sander and Walker Evans, they were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt and paved the way for the medium’s integration into the broader arena of contemporary art. As professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, their influence was paramount on the celebrated generation of photographers known as the “Düsseldorf School” such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

The Bechers photographed against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, using an old-fashioned tripod-mounted view camera of the kind used by Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. They treated their subjects as “anonymous sculpture” (the name of their first monograph) that could only be fully rendered through either multiple views from different perspectives or more often, through the typological accumulation and serial presentation of multiple specimens. Although they were artists not scientists, the Bechers used an almost Linnean system of classification—another important 19th century precedent which they made resolutely modern.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are the most important figures in European photography since 1950. Influenced by the formal rigor and typological method of prewar artists such as August Sander and Walker Evans, they were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt and paved the way for the medium’s integration into the broader arena of contemporary art. As professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, their influence was paramount on the celebrated generation of photographers known as the “Düsseldorf School” such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

The Bechers photographed against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, using an old-fashioned tripod-mounted view camera of the kind used by Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. They treated their subjects as “anonymous sculpture” (the name of their first monograph) that could only be fully rendered through either multiple views from different perspectives or more often, through the typological accumulation and serial presentation of multiple specimens. Although they were artists not scientists, the Bechers used an almost Linnean system of classification—another important 19th century precedent which they made resolutely modern.

The Bechers included the photographs on this wall in their 1977 publication Framework Houses of the Siegen Industrial Region. They appear in a special section at the end of the book titled “Groups of Houses.” The early landscape-format photographs demonstrate how individual framework houses are members of a large community of buildings displaying variations of a single architectural style. The Bechers generally did not exhibit these and other similar wide-field views, which show natural topography and surrounding context, until 2003, near the end of their fifty years of working together.

The earliest surviving independent works by Bernd Becher are several rare drawings and photocollages of the Eisernhardter Tiefbau Mine, made before the formation of his artistic partnership with Hilla Wobeser in 1959. These include the works presented on this wall and directly opposite. They reveal the artist’s lifelong interest in the accurate description of mining and manufacturing structures familiar to him from his childhood. Here, Bernd takes special care to focus on the mine’s wooden framework features and its idiosyncratic winding tower, which rises above the buildings like an enormous windblown flag.

Bernd Becher was smitten at an early age by the unorthodox beauty of the vernacular mining architecture that occupied the landscape where he spent his childhood. In these two meticulous drawings, the determined artist recorded each wooden beam, window, ventilation shaft, tower, and roof detail, taking care to show the relationships among these elements. He soon learned that the camera—if operated with specific constraints—could produce results much more effectively. A year after he completed these drawings and related photographs, the mine closed permanently. Archaeologists believe that iron ore had been extracted from the Eisernhardter site since 500 B.C.

Completed when Bernd Becher was about twenty-one years old, this accomplished lithograph is believed to be the earliest surviving composition by the artist. The individual elements are simply but effectively delineated and include a worker’s clothing, a drop cloth, crude scaffolding, and a large steel float for plastering walls and floors. The interior view evokes the scene at the beginning or end of a typical workday without depicting the laborer or the labor itself.

This exceptional assemblage includes three razor-cut photographs of blast-furnace pipes braided together into a handsome knot. Part Giorgio de Chirico (one of the artist’s favorite painters), part pretzel, the metaphysical work shows Bernd Becher’s playful sense of humor and appreciation for the complexity and visual wonderment of industrial forms.

In 2013 Hilla Becher informed Thomas Weaver, the British architectural historian, that after her apprenticeship with the photographer Walter Eichgrün she was “crazy about metal. . . . I was absolutely obsessed with it. . . . My experience was that metal and black-and-white photography came together very nicely. Strangely, the same thing doesn’t happen with brick. I was always really mad at brick buildings because they look so stupid somehow. Whereas if you look up at a metal blast furnace, for example, you see something that has this half-matte, half-glossy surface. It’s here that you discover, if not beauty, then at least something similar.”

The works presented here are among the earliest by Hilla Becher and include detailed studies of metal forms and tree leaves. They present an intuitive understanding of the sculptural value of the materials when properly illuminated, silhouetted, and photographed. Collectively, they show a level of photographic mastery and precision that Hilla brought to the collaboration with Bernd Becher. Their survival in the artists’ archive confirms that at least Hilla Becher continued to work independently and commercially in the early years after the partnership began in 1959.

In these studies of tree leaves, Hilla Becher is operating in a long tradition of natural realism that connects her work to that of many earlier German artists, including the photographs of Karl Blossfeldt and the printed botanical and zoological studies of Ernst Haeckel (see display case). What was important to Blossfeldt, Haeckel, and the Bechers was not simple exactitude but a particular type of graphic description and presentation that could reveal the unique, often quirky, and at times humorous structure of any form.

Even after the establishment of the Bechers’ professional partnership in 1959, Hilla continued to accept commission work. She produced this dizzying view of the metal superstructure of an electrical tower as a graphic for a display of industrial design at a German trade fair in Khartoum. This vintage photograph was copied and used by the pavilion designer as oversize enlargements. Hilla also documented the interior and exterior of the innovative prefabricated shed pavilion with its lively metal banding.

Even after the establishment of the Bechers’ professional partnership in 1959, Hilla continued to accept commission work. She produced this study of the inner architecture of a seashell as a graphic for a display of industrial design at a German trade fair in Khartoum. This vintage photograph was copied and used by the pavilion designer as oversize enlargements. Hilla also documented the interior and exterior of the innovative prefabricated shed pavilion with its lively metal banding.

For both research purposes and aesthetic pleasure, Hilla Becher assembled a collection of illustrated books dedicated to scientific classification. None on the theme of biological order was more important to the artists’ development than Ernst Haeckel’s 1904 Kunstformen der Natur. The plate from a disbound volume presented here shows a typological comparison of sea urchins and sand dollars.

For both research purposes and aesthetic pleasure, Hilla Becher assembled a collection of illustrated books dedicated to scientific classification. None on the theme of biological order was more important to the artists’ development than Ernst Haeckel’s 1904 Kunstformen der Natur. The plate from a disbound volume presented here shows a typological comparison of marine invertebrates.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are the most important figures in European photography since 1950. Influenced by the formal rigor and typological method of prewar artists such as August Sander and Walker Evans, they were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt and paved the way for the medium’s integration into the broader arena of contemporary art. As professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, their influence was paramount on the celebrated generation of photographers known as the “Düsseldorf School” such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

The Bechers photographed against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, using an old-fashioned tripod-mounted view camera of the kind used by Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. They treated their subjects as “anonymous sculpture” (the name of their first monograph) that could only be fully rendered through either multiple views from different perspectives or more often, through the typological accumulation and serial presentation of multiple specimens. Although they were artists not scientists, the Bechers used an almost Linnean system of classification—another important 19th century precedent which they made resolutely modern.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are the most important figures in European photography since 1950. Influenced by the formal rigor and typological method of prewar artists such as August Sander and Walker Evans, they were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt and paved the way for the medium’s integration into the broader arena of contemporary art. As professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, their influence was paramount on the celebrated generation of photographers known as the “Düsseldorf School” such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

The Bechers photographed against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, using an old-fashioned tripod-mounted view camera of the kind used by Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. They treated their subjects as “anonymous sculpture” (the name of their first monograph) that could only be fully rendered through either multiple views from different perspectives or more often, through the typological accumulation and serial presentation of multiple specimens. Although they were artists not scientists, the Bechers used an almost Linnean system of classification—another important 19th century precedent which they made resolutely modern.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are the most important figures in European photography since 1950. Influenced by the formal rigor and typological method of prewar artists such as August Sander and Walker Evans, they were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt and paved the way for the medium’s integration into the broader arena of contemporary art. As professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, their influence was paramount on the celebrated generation of photographers known as the “Düsseldorf School” such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

The Bechers photographed against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, using an old-fashioned tripod-mounted view camera of the kind used by Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. They treated their subjects as “anonymous sculpture” (the name of their first monograph) that could only be fully rendered through either multiple views from different perspectives or more often, through the typological accumulation and serial presentation of multiple specimens. Although they were artists not scientists, the Bechers used an almost Linnean system of classification—another important 19th century precedent which they made resolutely modern.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are the most important figures in European photography since 1950. Influenced by the formal rigor and typological method of prewar artists such as August Sander and Walker Evans, they were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt and paved the way for the medium’s integration into the broader arena of contemporary art. As professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, their influence was paramount on the celebrated generation of photographers known as the “Düsseldorf School” such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

The Bechers photographed against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, using an old-fashioned tripod-mounted view camera of the kind used by Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. They treated their subjects as “anonymous sculpture” (the name of their first monograph) that could only be fully rendered through either multiple views from different perspectives or more often, through the typological accumulation and serial presentation of multiple specimens. Although they were artists not scientists, the Bechers used an almost Linnean system of classification—another important 19th century precedent which they made resolutely modern.

Whenever possible, the Bechers tried to make in-the-round photographic sequences of each chosen subject for their ever-expanding archive. Unlike the winding towers seen nearby, here the upper part of the tower contains the engine that activates the cables and pulls up the coal cars. What is mostly invisible in these top-heavy buildings with their odd modernist ethos is the winding apparatus. Put together in a grid, they have a strangely fascinating effect, like the arrangements of exotic sea creatures by Ernst Haeckel seen in the wall case near the gallery entrance.

By the end of the 1960s, the Bechers had already built a fascinating archive of industrial forms that they would continue to enlarge for another forty years. As the collection grew, the conceptual possibilities of combining related pictures in varied typologies expanded exponentially. This eighteen-part work, one of a small series of "collective portraits," includes views of different types of technical buildings at the Anna mine in Alsdorf. Located just over an hour by car from Düsseldorf, the site offered the Bechers the rare opportunity to record each building generally in isolation. Arranged in grid form, the suite of photographs presents an impressive graphic tableau.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernhard and Hilla Becher are among the most important figures in postwar German photography. For the last thirty years, the artists have examined the dilapidated industrial architecture of Europe and North America, from water towers and blast furnaces to the surrounding workers’ houses. The Bechers treat their subjects (in this instance the mineheads that deliver raw materials to the surface), as the exotic specimens of a long-dead species. Photographing against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, they allow a perverse beauty to emerge from their subjects’ crazy plethora of forms. Like freakish second cousins to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, these sad industrial behemoths lampoon the Modernist fetishization of technological progress, unwittingly becoming monuments—both pathetic and noble—to an era racing towards its close.

Bernd and Hilla Becher were notoriously exacting about how their photographs were constructed in the camera, printed in the darkroom, and sequenced and reproduced in their many publications. Interestingly, they were rather generous with how and where their photographs were used in other printed materials, such as promotional leaflets, invitations, and exhibition posters. The posters gathered in this exhibition display a variety of typographic treatments and arrangements.

Both as artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are the most important figures in European photography since 1950. Influenced by the formal rigor and typological method of prewar artists such as August Sander and Walker Evans, they were considered equals and fellow travelers by Minimalist sculptors such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt and paved the way for the medium’s integration into the broader arena of contemporary art. As professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, their influence was paramount on the celebrated generation of photographers known as the “Düsseldorf School” such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

The Bechers photographed against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, using an old-fashioned tripod-mounted view camera of the kind used by Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. They treated their subjects as “anonymous sculpture” (the name of their first monograph) that could only be fully rendered through either multiple views from different perspectives or more often, through the typological accumulation and serial presentation of multiple specimens. Although they were artists not scientists, the Bechers used an almost Linnean system of classification—another important 19th century precedent which they made resolutely modern.

These sketches offer evidence of the Bechers’ methodical practice and thorough efforts to build a vast collection of industrial imagery. Once the artists had identified a site to explore, significant advance planning was required to seek permission in writing from company executives, meet with representatives at the mines, and secure access permits. Often, while on the road, they happened upon potentially interesting structures that they only had time to record in quick sketches or Polaroids. These then became valuable notes for the next road trip.

These Polaroids offer evidence of the Bechers’ methodical practice and thorough efforts to build a vast collection of industrial imagery. Once the artists had identified a site to explore, significant advance planning was required to seek permission in writing from company executives, meet with representatives at the mines, and secure access permits. Often, while on the road, they happened upon potentially interesting structures that they only had time to record in quick snapshots or sketches. These then became valuable notes for the next road trip.

As both artists and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher are among the most important figures in postwar German photography, having trained a generation of artists. At first glance, their work may appear affectless in its encyclopedic approach to the industrial vernacular, but many views parade the photographers’ emotional and aesthetic leanings. Shot from an elevated and, what they call, "ideal" vantage point, this view of a Hannover coal mine’s various structures takes the appearance of a monumental family portrait, encompassing various generations built between the mid-nineteenth-century and World War II. The oldest mine here is housed in the castlelike edifice of a type called a Malakoff Tower, so named after a strategic fort that survived an 1856 siege during the Crimean War. Found in the most unlikely of places, such cultural patrimony is under perrenial threat of erasure once older structures fail to accommodate up-to-date industrial methods. While the Bechers most often worked against time to record architectural forms for posterity, this Malakoff Tower found preservation by a local museum of industry. Inverting the progress of generations, the oldest structure now stands as a lone fossil, while many of the surrounding structures were demolished about 1980.

The American sculptor Sol LeWitt was a notable collector of the work of artists he admired, including those with whom he may not have had an obvious affinity. Here, however, in this rigidly frontal study of a Welsh cooling tower with a geometrically precise exoskeleton of cross braces, it is not hard to see what might have been the attraction. LeWitt owned this photograph for some fifty years; it came to The Met after his death as a generous gift of his family.

This grand, sixteen-part typology was acquired by The Met in 1980, its first acquisition of photographs by the Bechers. At the time, the artists’ aesthetic practice and seemingly prosaic, repetitive ethos were somewhat bewildering to both traditional photography collectors and public institutions. By the decade’s end, however, the Bechers had become among the first photographers to bridge the divide between photography and the rest of the visual arts. In 1988, when these water towers were first published, the English architecture critic Reyner Banham noted: "The presence of human beings may have been relentlessly excluded, but the handiwork of men is everywhere visible."