SUSANNE LANGE: 'HISTORY OF STYLE - INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF BERND AND HILLA BECHER'

Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’

In 2005 a book was published by Thames & Hudson: Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic forms of industrial buildings.

The book comprises:

a)      Foreword;

b)      an essay by Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’, dated ‘Cologne, June 2004’;

c)       61 illustrations in duotone which are photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher that ‘constitute a representative selection from the broad range of subjects chosen by the Bechers in what are characteristic ‘portraits’ of the objects in question.  Subjects include cooling towers, water towers and winding towers, blast furnaces, lime kilns, gravel plants, grain elevators, gas tanks and even details of the interiors of these industrial edifices’.

The endpaper note states: ‘Rendered timeless by the camera and isolated from their original, often perplexingly complex surroundings, the structures photographed by the Bechers appear as monumental symbols of their own history – with all the stylistic diversity of great masterpieces of architecture’.

This is a personal summary of the essay by Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’

Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’

The photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher are found in widely differing collections throughout the world.  They are found alongside major figures in minimal and conceptual art, as well being counted with leading documentary and narrative photographers.  They are also highly esteemed by industrial archaeologists and architectural conservationists.  The Bechers also set new standards in perceptual aesthetics, showing heavy industry as art.  

‘The Bechers’ black and white photographs are ultimately alienated quotations of reality, their objective dimension developed mainly by the artists’ insistence on recording motifs with prosaic precision’.  

The Bechers’ imagery is not a subjective response: it refrains from metaphor and symbolism.  The lineage of the Bechers’ work is the ‘international avant-garde of the 1960s in minimal and conceptual art’.

Bernd Becher

Bernd Becher had a childhood interest in industrial buildings: he grew up in Siegen (in western Germany) close to a steelworks.  In 1954 he enrolled at the State Art Academy in Stuttgart to study art.  Here he was encouraged in his interest in industrial architecture.  In the mid 1950s Bernd Becher became aware that economic change would lead to the decline of heavy industry in his home area: he would return here to sketch plant and buildings.  In 1957 he photographed demolition under way at the Eisenhardter Tiefbau mine near Siegen to assist him with sketches he intended to make.  Soon afterwards Bernd Becher abandoned sketching for photography so that he could record the industrial landscape that he knew so well before it was lost.

In 1957 Bernd Becher moved to Dusseldorf Art Academy where he decided that juxtaposition would be the most effective arrangement for ‘formal analysis’ of the subjects of his photographs.  This approach was perfected from 1959 when Bernd began working with Hilla Wobeser who was also passionate about technical and industrial themes: she was also accomplished in photographic technique. 

Hilla Wobeser

Hilla Wobeser had been encouraged in photography from the age of 13 by her mother who had had photographic training in Berlin in the 1920s.  In 1951 Hilla Wobeser began a three year apprenticeship at the Eichgrun photography studio in her birthplace – Potsdam, in eastern Germany.  At the end of the three years Hilla moved westwards to Dusseldorf to work at an advertising agency where Bernd Becher also worked occasionally.  She subsequently enrolled at Dusseldorf Art Academy.  In 1961 Bernd and Hilla married and they left the Academy.

The industrial landscape

In the early 1960s the couple photographed in western Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom where, in 1966, they benefitted from a British Council grant.  In 1968 the Bechers produced their first photographs of industrial areas in North America.  Since the 1960s the Bechers have revisited many places to fully record the industrial landscape that was being lost.  This work was done at their own initiative with no patron to satisfy.

Anonymous sculptures in a process of constant transformation

Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological style of juxtaposed similar subjects has a systematic approach that is essentially a scientific method of verification.  At the same time, the typologies are enlivened by the aesthetic sensibility of the two photographers.  And the ‘anonymous sculptures’ that are the subject of each of the Bechers’ collections of photographs are presented as a type that is in a process of ‘constant transformation’. 

Through the gallery in Dusseldorf that was owned by Konrad Fischer, the Bechers met ‘the international avant-garde’ including the artists Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt.  This led to exhibitions that innovated by combining film, performance and installations.  In 1972 the Bechers had their first show in New York with the sponsorship of the gallerist Ileana Sonnabend.

Subsequent exhibitions were held in the USA and Germany in which the Bechers’ significance in the history of photography was acknowledged. 

The Bechers built up their own archive of historical photographs of industrial structures and landscapes.

The Bechers’ work has led to industrial structures being conserved and re-used, rather than being demolished when their original purpose had ceased.

Awards granted to the Bechers in recent years have been in honour of their time as teachers at Dusseldorf Art Academy.  The couple held the first chair of artistic photography at the academy between 1976 and 1996.