photograph

Bernd and Hilla Becher first met in 1957 while studying painting at the State Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany. Two years later, they began photographing Germany and Holland’s disappearing industrial structures, using distinctive large-format, medium-contrast gelatin silver prints. From 1965, they expanded their project to include Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States, and they continued photographing these constructions for almost fifty years. These photographs formed an archive of basic architectural forms of the late twentieth century, including oil refineries, water towers, industrial façades, grain elevators, gas tanks, winding towers, and lime kilns, like the ones seen here. Their neutral views, which are often arranged in grids or sequenced in monographs, encourage a comparative analysis of the various forms, emphasizing similarities in size, shape, materials, and topography.