Bernd And Becher
Essay by Lynne Cooke
Vernacular industrialized architecture has been the sole subject
of Bernd and Hilla Becher's work for some forty years. Their
vast photographic inventory now ranges geographically from
western Europe through North America and taxonomically across an
enormous array of heterogeneous building types, many verging on
obsolescence—mine shafts, lime kilns, silos, cooling towers,
blast furnaces, tipples, gasometers—all classified by reference
to function. The initial impetus that led the young Bernd Becher
to begin photographing such subjects in the late 1950s was
purely practical: he wanted to use his recordings as raw
material for the paintings he was then making in a Neue
Sachlichkeit style. In those same years Hilla Becher, née
Wobeser, apprenticed and briefly worked in a professional
advertising studio, where she developed a passion for
photographing technical and mechanistic subjects. Once husband
and wife started working together, in 1957, they assumed
identical roles: tasks are not separately assigned to one or the
other; both are involved in scouting sites, negotiating with the
owners and other authorities, setting up the cameras, and
printing. The art they have produced does not fall within
conventional categories of documentary photography, though it
has many affiliations with that long-standing tradition. The
disciplined ethic with which this dedicated German couple
defined, then refined, their project of recording for posterity
the increasingly neglected relics of the industrial era, with
its domestic offshoots, has yielded not just an aesthetic but a
vision.
From their earliest publication, titled tellingly Anonyme
Skulpturen: Eine Typologie technischer Bauten (Anonymous
Sculpture: A Typology of Technical Buildings), 1970, the
Bechers' work has circulated within the realm of contemporary
art practice and discourse. Certain features of their art, the
hallmark of which is, in Charles Wright's felicitous phrase, "a
controlled beauty," make this positioning particularly
apt—though the Bechers themselves do not regard the issue as of
great import.1 Typically, their works present
each industrial motif in what soon evolved into a rigorous,
disciplined signature manner whose focus is an exploration of
the relation between the subject's function and the resulting
photographic representation. Isolated, centered, and frontally
framed, each motif is shot in as objective a manner as possible.
The combination of large-format cameras and finely grained
black-and-white film ensures a remarkable tonal range in each
print. By working only under slightly overcast skies and early
in the morning during the seasons of spring and fall, the
Bechers are ensured of an even, diffuse light with minimal
shadows, a lambent ambience that enhances their intensive focus
on the motif, which is revealed in crystalline detail, grounded
in a formal factual clarity. All anecdotal incident, such as
intrusive foliage, stray animals, and humans, is sedulously
avoided: nothing disturbs the systematic ascetic neutrality.
Tellingly, the vantage point tends to be subtly elevated.
"Looking at an object from a point half way up it [causes] it to
appear before you in its full reach and free of distortion,"
they explain.2 The raised camera position
also causes the horizon to appear to recede, the surroundings to
become more panoramic, and the object to stand forth prominently
so that, while clearly related to its environment, it
simultaneously appears somewhat removed, apart, an effect
enhanced by the expansive neutral skies. The results evidence a
brilliant understanding of scale relations—of how a vast
structure can be made to fit a small-sized pictorial
format—without rhetoric or expressive distortion.
By the mid-1960s the Bechers had also settled on a preferred
presentational mode: the grid. Groupings of prints, each print
measuring sixteen by twelve inches or smaller, either framed
discretely or encased within a single large frame, facilitate
direct, immediate comparison between motifs, which are arrayed
without hierarchy, according to type, function, and/or material.
Juxtaposition permits industrial structures that at first might
appear prevailingly similar, even uniform, to register as
significantly different one from another. Given that most
viewers know little about the economic, engineering, and
functional requirements that determine the generic forms and
characters of these structures, comparison of the several
components in any of these multipartite works operates primarily
at a formal level—that is, in an aesthetic dimension.
Differences and similarities among related motifs consequently
appear as variations on an ideal form, given that the structures
are family members from the same species. Specific subjects are
interpreted as anonymous plastic forms—as anonymous sculpture.
In 1989–91, for an exhibition at Dia in New York, the Bechers
introduced a second format into their oeuvre: single images that
are larger in size—twenty-four by twenty inches—and presented
individually rather than as gridded tableaux. Several galleries
within this extensive exhibition were devoted to a specific
subject, a strategy that allowed new typologies to cohere. This
presentational strategy was heralded in part by a series of
finely printed publications that they had begun to produce,
beginning with Framework Houses, in 1977. This was soon
followed by, among others, Water Towers (1988),
Blast Furnaces (1990), and Pennsylvania Coal Mine
Tipples (1991), the latter timed to mark the Dia show.
Devoted to one kind of industrialized plant, this ongoing series
of books constitutes a type-by-type corpus documenting a rapidly
dying industrial age. The brief texts that the artists wrote to
accompany the first books in the series provided information on
the genesis of the various typologies, offering a historical
positioning that corresponded to the inclusion, in the captions,
of the date on which each building was constructed together with
the year in which the photograph was taken. In more recent
publications this approach has been superseded by accounts that
concentrate on how the plants function, an approach paralleled
by the elimination of the plants' dates from the captions. Taken
together, these decisions further abstract the subjects from
their sociohistorical ambience in favor of a concentration on
the typological relation of the individual instance to the
generic, of the single member to the species or class.
For Dia:Beacon the Bechers ring further changes on their
presentational modalities by capitalizing on the fact that the
gallery they selected for their work is divided into two equal
parts. All the photographs in one half of the space are partial
views, which are relatively unusual in their oeuvre. Some of
these are sequenced by type into small subsets. For example,
three of the Winding Towers are installed on one wall; the Blast
Furnaces hang on another. A diptych—a format they rarely
employ—occupies one of the two short walls that bisect the
gallery. Most of these images, which have seldom been exhibited,
were recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s, reflecting a
subtle shift of focus in their work. The one "vintage" image,
from 1968, is formally no different, testimony both to the roots
of this reorientation in certain early forays and to the
remarkable consistency and cohesion of their methodology and
aesthetic.
The other half of the gallery is devoted to Aggregates, that is,
to details of large-scale machinery, pipes, conduits, and
metallic containers that belong to a diverse range of plants. A
suite of eight lime kilns, vessels of one of the oldest and most
commonplace processes long proceeding the onset of the
industrial age, and hence frequently found in their archive, are
counterpointed by images of plants that involve what are, for
them, unusually contemporary procedures and proces-ses—notably,
Styrofoam and petrochemical production.
Tracing the history of a rapidly declining industrial era many
of whose older technical processes and functions are now
defunct, and of individual buildings decaying or threatened with
destruction, is an important impulse in the Bechers' practice.
Well aware of the fine-art and commercial portrayal of industry
by previous specialists and by trade photographers alike, they
have gradually assembled a second archive to probe and survey
the recording of this thematic from other perspectives.
Primarily heuristic in function, the counterarchive both expands
and focuses their knowledge of their subject matter. In contrast
to those predecessors whose work constitutes a traditional
industrial archaeology, a particular level of self-conscious
awareness and reflexivity defines and distinguishes their
enterprise.
While foregrounding the urgency of their archival mission, the
Bechers also stress their concern for canonical documentary
procedures, such as ensuring the legibility of the image: "The
photographs should always show all the details and the textures
of the materials," they insist,3 adding
that they let "the forms speak for themselves and become
readable," that they refuse "to hide or exaggerate or depict
anything in an untrue fashion."4 Viewed in
this light, their work may be placed in a lineage stemming from
such early modernist luminaries as Eugène Atget and August
Sander, rather than in relation to artisanal modes of the kind
that subtend industrial archaeology. Sander sought to classify
into a pictorial catalogue, in a "style devoid of style," the
professional and social types that made up modern Germany. The
resonant formal uniformity of his lifelong project Menschen
des 20. Jahrhunderts (Man in the Twentieth Century)
exceeds the strictly documentary, becoming a cornerstone in the
history of twentieth-century modernism. The Bechers are today
the foremost exponents of that revered legacy.
They are nonetheless fully attuned to the contemporaneous
practices of many fellow artists who, in the 1960s, began to use
the camera as a convenient tool for recording and documenting.
Notable among these artists were Robert Smithson, whom they
assisted when he arrived in the Ruhr district in 1968 to explore
the demise of the industrial era from a very different
perspective, and Hanne Darboven, whose project engaging
collective cultural memory, Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983
(Cultural History 1880–1983), 1980–83, shares certain
impulses, methodologies, and techniques with the Bechers. Other
parallels may be drawn with such artists as Sol LeWitt, Donald
Judd, Carl Andre, and Ed Ruscha (with his deadpan early book
projects), who based their compositional and structural
modalities on seriality and permutation. In addition, Judd and
many of his peers shared the Bechers' appreciation for and
knowledge of anonymous industrial structures, vernacular
building types, and early modern as well as contemporary
engineering.5 These affinities and
confluences generated the discursive context for the initial
reception of their work, one that subsumed archaeological,
sociological, and strictly photography-based critiques into a
late modernist agenda centered in formal, structural, and serial
procedures. Highly influential as teachers, the Bechers have in
turn shaped another generation of artists both orthodox and
aberrant, notable among them Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and
Thomas Ruff, their former students from the Kunstakademie
Düsseldorf.
Notes
1. Charles Wright, "Foreword," in Bernd and Hilla Becher,
Pennsylvania Coal Mine Tipples (New York: Dia Center for
the Arts, 1991), n.p. "The question if this is a work of [fine]
art or not is not very interesting for us," Hilla Becher has
stated on a number of occasions. See, for example, Carl Andre,
"A Note on Bernhard and Hilla Becher," Artforum 11, no. 5
(December 1972), p. 59.
2. Bernd and Hilla Becher, quoted in "Interview mit Bernd und
Hilla Becher," in Bernd und Hilla Becher (Munich: WB
Verlag, 1989), p. 14.
3. Bernd and Hilla Becher, quoted in Angela Grauerholz and Anne
Ramsden, "Photographing Industrial Architecture: An Interview
with Bernd and Hilla Becher," Parachute 22 (Spring
1981), p. 15.
4. Ibid., p. 18.
5. Donald Judd's review of the 1964 exhibition "Twentieth
Century Engineering" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is
telling here. See Judd, "Month in Review," Arts Magazine
39, no. 1 (October 1964), reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete
Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, and New York: New York University
Press, 1975), pp. 136–39.
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