Michael Collins profiles the winners of 2002s prestigious erasmus prize for Europeanculture. Arranging these matched photographs in a grid, the Bechers produced what they called "typologies," which grouped buildings by function, underscoring the similarities and differences between structures. all of your clothes laid out one piece at a time on your bedroom floor etc. Staff Michael Wolf's early career as a photo journalist is perhaps evident in his various studies of urban life. - Every Building on the Sunset Strip (and other photo books). The Bechers' images were sometimes labelled, by themselves and by others, as "anonymous sculptures," alluding both to the unknown engineers and to the lack of conscious attention to the sculptural qualities of these structures. Biography Bernd Becher was born in Siegen. The camera's ability to make an accurate record of particular visual phenomena has meant that artists and photographers, seeking to make a systematic document of aspects of the world, have been repeatedly drawn to photography. They throw it up, they use it, they misuse it, they throw it away. Typologies - PhotoPedagogy In Pitheads, each structure has the same basic form, but varies in the angle of the diagonal that leads into the mine, the number of supports linking this diagonal to the base and in the nature and number of buildings grouped at the base of each pithead. To what extent do photographic typologies attempt to capture "the spirit of an age"? Bernd and Hilla Becher: Landscape/Typology @ MoMA Bernd (1931-2007) and Hilla (b. 18. While photographing the individual structures, they also documented the broader industrial sites that provided those structures contexts. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff. Bernd and Hilla Becher's lifetime project of documenting the industrial landscape of our time secures their position in the canon of postwar photographers. Why is the camera (and photography) particularly well-suited to the creation of typologies? Tom Sutcliffe Graphic Designer (40,000 negatives were destroyed during WWII and in a fire) produced volume of portraits entitled 'The Face of Our Time' in 1929. Bernd and Hilla Becher's photography can be considered conceptual art, typological study, and topological documentation. We didnt really see it as artists, we saw it as something like natural history, Hilla Becher noted in 2012. As the founders of what has come to be known as the 'Becher school' or the Dsseldorf School of . Relating similar buildings according to their structural forms and original purposes, the Bechers created a vast taxonomy of modern architectural types facing eradication. Blast Furnaces In the short film opposite, the artist discusses his interest in photography. These are less well known among the Bechers rigorous documentary work, nonetheless they form a vital part of their oeuvre. Every building was framed in exactly the same way: frontally, in isolation, from a reasonable distance, against a gray overcast sky. Such an approach had long been advocated by the Bechers, who in 1970 called their first book on vernacular architecture Anonymous Sculptures and who eagerly participated in Conceptual and Minimal Art exhibitions. The following year, Hilla also enrolled in the Kunstakademie and they began working together. The Bechers' work represents the past, in the form of buildings, without acknowledging or engaging with this rupture and this approach to modern history can be seen as either part of or counter to the struggle amongst German artists, most prominently Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, to come to terms with postwar identity. In choosing to photograph gas tanks, the Bechers position these forms as worthy of attention, grouping them for inspection in a similar manner to that in which artists and scientists had previously grouped gothic cathedrals and rare butterflies. In some cases, the buildings appear abandoned, with broken windows, while in others vehicles suggest that they are still in use. The pair began to work together to document disappearing industrial architecture in 1959, their different backgrounds and approaches complimenting one another. The cooling tower is isolated from its context as part of a larger industrial site. ", "I was interested in a straightforward 19th-century way of photographing an object. At present, the Streets of Los Angeles project numbers more than forty separate shoots and well over a million exposures [], Photography has always been central to his artistic practice, most notably for the slender, pocket-sized volumes that he began publishing in 1963 and his extensive documentation of Los Angeles streets, beginning with Sunset Boulevard in 1965. This German couple met as art students in Dsseldorf, in 1957. In this period, sculpture that drew upon industrial materials and techniques was developing, with artists such as Jean Tinguely, Michael Heizer and Donald Judd coming to prominence. Together, the Bechers went out with a large 8 x 10-inch view camera and photographed these buildings from a number of different angles, but always with a straightforward "objective" point of view. For this reason, the death on October 10, 2015 of Hilla Becher at age 81 felt not only like a profound loss but also like an abrupt end to a unique way of seeing the world. Tate. Prior to Hilla's time studying photography at the Kunstakademie Dsseldorf from 1958 to 1961, she had completed an apprenticeship as a photographer in her native Potsdam. ", "I've always said that we are documenting the sacred buildings of Calvinism. What formal and aesthetic similarities and differences do you find in the examples of typologies above? Pitheads Calvinism rejects all forms of art and therefore never developed its own architecture. The American Photo Magazine / Bernd Becher retired from teaching in 1996, but Bernd and Hilla Becher continued to work, visiting sites across Europe and North America, until Bernd Becher's death in 2007. Their extensive series of water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine tipples, industrial facades, and other vernacular industrial architecture comprise an in-depth study of the intricate relationship between form and function. They were uninterested in prevailing trends in art and photography, but offered instead a model for disciplined living and seeing. While reluctant to talk about their photographic process, the level of skill evident in their images and their own professional training indicates that they must have been aware of the degree to which a photograph could not, as they often argued, be truly objective, given the number of decisions that shaped each image and each sequence of images. 22-1/4 x 18 inches (each framed) [56.5 x 45.7 cm], 18 x 22 inches (each framed) [45.7 x 55.9 cm], Blast Furnaces, Volklingen, Saar District, 36 x 123 inches (overall installed) [91.4 x 312.4 cm], 25-3/4 x 34-3/4 inches (framed) [65.5 x 88 cm], 59-1/4 x 43-1/4 inches (framed) [150.5 x 110 cm]. Create their own typological series documenting repeated forms where they live and work. The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. They did so in an . In 1990, they received an award at the Venice Biennale not for photography, but sculpture, due to their ability to illustrate the sculptural properties ofarchitecture. Bernd & Hilla Becher | Fraenkel Gallery How Do Asian American Photographers Envision New Possibilities for the Future? ", "What is an artist? This cutting-out, combined with unflattering skies and gridded layouts give the images a quasi-scientific appeal. Typologies of Industrial Buildings (The MIT Press) Hardcover - Amazon.co.uk Their work is rigorously objective in its aims, but in its exacting presentation stimulates consideration of the ways in which people organize and receive information about their own environments and the wider world. Among the first to recognize the artistic significance of these typologies was American Minimal artist Carl Andre, who wrote in Artforum in 1972: A partial catalogue of the typological subjects of Bernd and Hilla Becher includes: structures with the same function (all water towers); structures with the same function, but with different shapes (spherical, cylindrical, and conical water towers); structures with the same function and shape, but built with different materials (steel, cement, wood, brick, or some combination, such as wood and steel); structures with the same function, shape, and materials; comparative perspective views of ore and coal preparation plants; comparative frontal views of pithead towers; comparative and perspective views of pithead towers, high tension electrical pylons, blast furnaces, and factory buildings. Andres straightforward listing conformed to his own rejection of narrative and style and his preference for neutral systemic or serial practices. Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher Otherwise, it would just be heaps of paper. For the Bechers, these typologies were conceptual categories based on the general ideas used to sort a large body of information. Lost world: Bernd and Hilla Becher's legendary industrial photographs It is not unusual for a typology to include images made over the course of three decades, and in far-flung locations: the thirty images of blast furnaces in one grid were made between 1968 and 1995, in Alabama, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, as well as in Belgium, France, and Germany. By then she was skilled in operating heavy glass-plate cameras, and in 1951 she secured an apprenticeship with the conservative Berlin photographer Walter Eichgrun. The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher Beginning in the early 1960s, Bernd and Hilla Becher's collaboration produced over two hundred photographic collections of industrial buildings, such as smokestacks, water towers, and factories. This takes on special meaning if the object cannot be preserved. Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher 4.47 30 ratings2 reviews An encyclopedic collection of all known Becher industrial studies, arranged by building type. Some, such as Ed Ruscha, organized their images as the Bechers did, by type. Bernd and Hilla Becher's work aspires toward objective documentation, aiming for images without subjectivity. Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed over two hundred cooling towers over the course of their career, ranging from early wooden forms to more recent concrete structures. More interesting, though, is that the truer the Bechers photographic representation is to the object itself, the less mundane and more optical the image. This paper, first given at a conference at Tate Modern, investigates the rhythmic continuity of the comportment or bearing toward the world that they have made into an epic form and that has gained broader influence in the work of their successful students. In their elegant typologies, the blueprint of their attitude toward life endures. As is usual across the oeuvre of Bernd and Hilla Becher, each blast furnace is isolated, filling the frame, and there are fewer external indicators providing context. They derived inspiration from the precisionist approach of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) photographers August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt, and Albert Renger-Patzch of the 1920s, and utilizing a bulky large-format camera on a tripod, the Bechers photographed the specific character of each example of a type of construction as scientifically as possible. In addition, they were intrigued by the fact that so many of these industrial buildings seemed to have been built with a great deal of attention toward design. She was one half of a photography duo with her husband Bernd Becher. In a Becher grid, there is a sense that the same object is repeated again and againand yet each is unique. The structures in their work are too large for any individual to scrutinize whole, so the exacting frontal presentation in each image enables a more complete observation than is possible by standing in front of the real thing. Bernd and Hilla Becher Winding Towers, 1972 Phillips Bidding closed In 1966, German photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher set out in a Volkswagen for six months to photograph the monolithic architecture of coal mines in England and South Wales. The couple viewed their task as infinite and urgent and it was only in the eight years between her husband's death and her own, in 2015, that Hilla Becher travelled to countries without industrial sites to document. His matter-of-fact images are often presented in book form: Ruscha's book projects of the sixties and seventies have come to be recognized as central to photography's development, encouraging both conceptual approaches and interest in analyzing the built landscape. America is a place where scale and number are features of the culture. The photographs are portraits of our history. Calling yourself an artist does not make you one, that's for others to decide. Bernd Becher was appointed as Chair of Artistic Photography at the Dsseldorf Art Academy in 1976, establishing the school's photography program. Price on request. This group are now often referred to as the Dsseldorf School of Photography, in reference to the shared origins of their work in the Bechers' classes. By continuing to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies and our privacy policy. Robyn Pitts Membership Co-ordinator This technique serves to concentrate the audience's attention on the structure, encouraging consideration of the formal properties of the cooling tower itself as opposed to the means of representation. Meeting as students at the Kunstakademie Dsseldorf in 1957, Bernd and Hilla Becher first collaborated on photographing and documenting the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959. Their photographs never includedpeople. Bernd and Hilla Becher. 1972, is six suites of nine black-and-white photographs. Was it even photography in the firstplace. Sander's methodical, disciplined approach to photographing the world has had an enormous influence on later photographers, notably, . They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids. London Exhibitions of Photographers' Collections, An Artists Collages about Memory and Migration, Coco Capitns Vision of Youth Culture in Japan. They shot only on overcast days, so as to avoid shadows, and early in the morning during the seasons of spring and fall. Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work Hardcover - amazon.com The photo is only a substitute for an object; it is unsuitable as a picture in its customary sense. US$30,000-US$40,000. Ed Ruscha is an American artist who combines an interest in photography and painting. This particular sequence consists of industrial facades that are taller than they are wide. Brian Wallis remembers the work and life Hilla Becher. Will a Retrospective Revive Interest in Darrel Elliss Experimental Images. With her silver-bobbed hair and infectious intelligence, she deftly answered questions in precise English, and left to a standing ovation. As Hilla Becher has said of the couples architectural subjects, They are functional, and they reflect what they do.. Fraenkel Gallery. ", "the Bechers' way of working belongs to the past now. Carl Andre, "A Note on Bernhard and Hilla Becher," Artforum 11, no. Bernd & Hilla Becher Water Tower, Neville Island, near Pittsburgh, USA. Their work can be linked to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement of the 1920s and to such masters of German photography as Karl . Each blast furnace, gas tank, water tower, and coal tipple is photographed with exacting fidelity, resulting in images as true in description of the object as the medium of photography is capable of providing. This website uses cookies for a better browsing experience. The Bechers' photographs are taken from a frontal perspective against a grey sky, cropped so that the facades fill the frames, and the repeated composition draws attention to similarities and differences in form. Overlooked beauty and the relationship between form and function. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery. Bernd and Hilla Becher were two German conceptual photographers who together produced typographical documentation of industrial structures. ", "Technology is above requiring an interpretation; it interprets itself. Hilla Becher claimed, in 1974, that the question of whether their work was art or not was "not very interesting." In cities like Beijing, bikes have become relics of a bygone age, no longer a symbol of a unifying culture of cycling but rather emblems of social marginalisation. After this, Wobeser moved to Hamburg to work as an aerial photographer and then to Dsseldorf. The structure displayed here is testament not only to engineering, but to the human relationship with the land; the handmade quality of the tipple directs the audience's consideration to the geological knowledge that underpins the construction of and work at regional coal mines. This is a requiem for a lost world and shows that, through the passing of time, even that which was once considered purely functional and even ugly, can attain beauty when seen through the eyes of the most attentive photographers.". 'Gas Tanks', Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, 1965-2009 | Tate In essence, fleeting time was their subject, and photography allowed them to rescue sights that time has by now eradicated. The Bechers felt that their project was urgent and of the utmost importance; they did not take vacations, instead dedicating all available hours to their photography. In 1966, when they received a grant from the British Council allowing them to take photographs in England, Scotland and Wales, they worked with their two-year-old son, Max, at their feet. Bernd and Hilla Becher considered this arrangement by type, usually referred to as a typology, as a means of emphasizing the different solutions that engineers found for the problems industrial structures were built to address. For over 40 years, Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed the architecture of industrialisation: water towers, coal bunkers, blast furnaces, gas tanks and factory facades. This approach can also be seen in the work of their students, Other photographers who have explored this idea include. 'Every building on the Sunset Strip' captures this sense of an unfolding, largely homogenous, urban landscape, passing by through a car window. In this work she researches blood lines across the world, representing the results of her extensive research in rigorously designed display panels. This mode of display encouraged audiences to closely consider the form of the structures on display, with repetition facilitating a greater understanding of the ways in which different examples resembled or diverged from one another. They frequently travelled in a campervan with a portable darkroom, maximizing their productivity while on the road. Hannah Waterman Graphic Designer The spherical gas tanks are presented as the products of unknown engineers which do not express the individuality of their designers and the Bechers' presentation matches this, carefully avoiding any expression of the photographers' subjective responses, erasing the individual in order to focus on society more broadly. info@peopleofprint.com Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher Blast Furnaces (1969-95) Tate Estate of Bernd Becher & Hilla Becher What did they photograph? An encyclopedic collection of all known Becher industrial studies, arranged by building type. Bernd and Hilla Becher (The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection) Bernd and Hilla Becher spent their career documenting industrial structures across the Western world, creating a form of photography arranged by type that, through repetition, encourages viewers to engage deeply with the formal qualities of the subject matter. Hochofen (Blast Furnaces), Image V from the series: Typologies, 2007. Bernd Becher was born in 1931 and raised in the town of Siegen, close to the Hainer Htte steelworks, where many of his relatives worked. Well technically yes, but their work has also been referred to as sculpture. The Photographic Traces of Luc Tuymanss Ghostly Paintings, Gregory Crewdson and Lauren Ambrose on the Making of an Iconic Photograph, A Photographer Captures the Vitality of Life in Brazil. Because industry continues to evolve with new technologies, the Bechers work is that much more significant as a meticulous record of an industrial era as it enters the realm of artifact.. Bernd And Hilla Becher: Landscape/typology | Aperture | Winter 2008 Hilla Wobeser was born in 1934 in Potsdam, in what was later East Germany. Hilla Becher (1934-2015) | Aperture 49 Geary Street, 4th Floor Both studied at the Dsseldorf Art Academy whilst working in advertising; Wobeser also taught courses in photography to her peers. Bernd and Hilla Becher: Landscape/Typology | MoMA This is purely economic architecture. So we also used the methods of natural history books, like comparing things, having the same species in different versions. The Bechers exhibited these images in large, strictly ordered grids of nine, twelve, or sixteen photographs of nearly identical structures. Bernd & Hilla Becher: Photographic Typologies | People of Print
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