Summary of Bernd and Hilla Becher
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. The Bechers took thousands of images and divided these into categories based on function and sequences based on formal similarities, borrowing from scientific classification for artistic ends, focusing attention on the hitherto overlooked, suggesting that industrial forms were worthy of scrutiny. 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. Bernd and Hilla Becher aspired to direct the audience's attention away from the photograph, emphasizing the content rather than light, perspective, or other artistic choices, but in doing so created a school of photography that forced reconsideration both of the presentation of images and the preservation of the built environment.
Accomplishments
- Since the 1960s, the Bechers have focused exclusively on industrial structures that are typically overlooked. Their photographs focus the audience's vision on buildings and machinery from which people typically look away, demanding serious consideration. Their consistent focus on presenting structures associated with the coal and steel industries leads the viewer to reconsider their aesthetic preferences and encourages ongoing interest in industrial form.
- Bernd and Hilla Becher's work aspires toward objective documentation, aiming for images without subjectivity. Their photographs reacted against the prevailing mid-20th-century trend toward images in which the subject of a photograph is transformed by artistic elements such as soft focus, atmospheric lighting, or creative perspective. The Bechers photographed all structures in the same way, from a direct angle with a low horizon against a grey sky that minimized shadows, cropping each image so that the subject filled the frame.
- The Bechers' images are often associated with Conceptual art, due to the way in which they transform structures into form through removing them from their political and environmental context, even though the artists rejected this association. In arranging and displaying the images in sequences according to type, the works emphasize the similarities and differences between the structures that are presented. In this way, the arrangement of images acts as a commentary on aesthetics.
- The Bechers' lack of apparent consideration of industry's role in Nazi Germany is striking and has been subject to some criticism. A number of sites that they photographed were almost certainly involved in producing machinery and weapons used by German forces in World War II, but their images give no indication of this, tightly focusing on aesthetics at the expense of historical engagement. While other artists working in the same period argued that it was not possible to look at the past without considering the Holocaust and the rupture of World War II, the Bechers sought continuity with Weimar photographic traditions and focused on remnants of the industrial age that arguably came to a close with World War II whilst avoiding political questions of memory. This has evoked questions about the moral responsibilities of artists, with some critics arguing that representation of the world is sufficient while others suggest that such a position is immoral; another group argues that the Becher's reluctance to engage is so extreme that it constitutes a response to, rather than an evasion of, questions of historical responsibility.
Biography of Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernd Becher was born in 1931 and raised in the town of Siegen, close to the Hainer Hütte steelworks, where many of his relatives worked. He had an apprenticeship as a painter and decorator with his father's company and spent a period in Italy working on his architectural drawing skills before enrolling in the State Art Academy in Stuttgart in 1954, where he would study painting, typography and graphic art. Bernd Becher foresaw that the creation of the European Economic Community in 1957 would transform industrial landscapes and he began sketching the Siegerland area and taking photographs to use as a basis for linocuts and lithographs around this point, due to the speed with which buildings were being demolished.
