Blast furnaces, cooling towers, gasometers, water towers, lime kilns, compressors, factory halls, head-frames of mine shafts - not the stuff of excitement for most of us. However these anonymous industrial structures have been a fountain of passion for the German photographers'...
[more]Blast furnaces, cooling towers, gasometers, water towers, lime kilns, compressors, factory halls, head-frames of mine shafts - not the stuff of excitement for most of us. However these anonymous industrial structures have been a fountain of passion for the German photographers' Bernd and Hilla Becher, who have avidly photographed them for over 40 years.
Their black-and-white images are all taken in the same clinical manner: a front and profile angle provide a clear and objective documentation of each structure, the building is placed in the center of the frame and isolated from its environment. The mass of photos are made coherent through categorization into typologies, revealing the vast diversity of objects all with the same purpose. They are non-identical, yet uniform; making the idiosyncratic differences and similarities become fascinating.
The Becher's describe their subjects as "buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style." Presented collectively, their images transform these buildings into objects worthy of interest, if not admiration.
The typological approach to photography has historic as well as aesthetic significance. We turn to photography because it is a rich means through which to represent - and interpret, reality - and the documentary aspect to the Bechers work has been widely appreciated by engineering and architectural historians.
The objective direction of their work was an unusual choice as after the two world wars, documentary style had become impossible. It was of good taste for german artists to "ignore history."
However the Bechers had some precedents, for example, in fellow German photographer August Sander, who over the period of forty years took portraits of thousands of German citizens. The idea of "the archive as art" was proposed by his oeuvre. He arranged these portraits according to social type and occupation - from peasant farmers to circus performers, to prosperous businessmen.
Bernd and Hilla Becher began taking portraits of modern industrial buildings in old factory sites in 1959.
Bernd Becher was born in 1931, in Siegen, Germany, studied painting and lithography and later, typography. Hilla Becher was born in 1934, in Potsdam. She studied painting at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, where she met Bernd Becher.
The two artists first collaborated in 1959 and they married in 1961. They began working as freelance photographers, concentrating on industrial photography. In 1991, the artists won the Leone d'Oro award for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. This was possible because in 1969, the artists had called the architectural subject matter of their photographs "anonymous sculpture."
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