Transcendent industrial relations

6 0 April 2016

hen probed by critics to contex-

tualise their vast collection of

photographs of industrial archi-

tecture, Hilla and Bernd Becher

stated that, “just as the medie-

val thought is manifest in a Gothic cathedral”,

then “so too is the industrial age captured in

the machinery once scattered across our

lands”.

For more than 40 years the Bechers, husband

and wife, documented a world made up of water

towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, grain eleva-

tors, collieries, and mine heads: a world of

machinery that was no longer used, obsolete;

a world that was being swiftly and ruthlessly

dismantled.

The epoch of the Industrial Revolution was

vanishing without trace, so the Bechers decided

to watch, camera at hand, capturing the death

throes of a once robust epoch.

Hilla and Bernd met in 1957 while working at

an advertising agency in Dusseldorf and discov-

ered they had a mutual love of industrial

architecture, especially that of the Ruhr

region. Bernd had grown up in the area and ini-

tially planned to draw and paint these huge

structures. But he soon realised that they were

being demolished before he was ﬁnished with

either pen or brush. Hilla, who was an experi-

enced photographer by then, thought it more

effective to use this medium instead, and

instructed Bernd in technique and printing. A

beautiful relationship was formed, and they

married in 1961.

During this decade the Bechers, with their

son Max in tow, travelled around in a VW

camper pulling an old caravan customised as a

darkroom. Their itinerary included Germany,

Holland and France, while in 1966 they

embarked on a six-month journey through Eng-

land and Wales taking pictures of the coal

industry. A love of collieries also took them to

North America in 1974, Pennsylvania, where

they recorded the coal mine tipples.

The objects of their affection might seem cur-

sory upon ﬁrst impression, but the Bechers'

working methods were anything but. Hilla

described their style as “direct, descriptive

photography”. This usually meant using lad

ders and scaffolding to shoot on their

large-format plate cameras, with overcast con-

ditions to minimise shadows and allow a neutral

backdrop. The same standard was applied to

each photograph to give complete objectivity.

Photos were published in gelatin silver prints,

and no monolith was considered too humdrum

to be reverently and painstakingly recorded by

them as one of their “anonymous sculptures”.

What transformed the Bechers' work from

documentary to art (although critics remain

divided on this categorisation) was their use of

typologies, which saw structures being exhib-

ited in grid formations made up of six to ﬁfteen

photographs. “By placing several cooling

towers side by side something happened,

something like tonal music”, Hilla said: “You

don’t see what makes the objects different until

you bring them together, so subtle are their

differences”.

Individually the pictures are impressive, but

collectively they take on a rippling power that

pulses right out across the grids: a series of gas

tanks that morph into displaced industrialised

glitter balls; framework houses that variegate

across the page like real-time mosaics; winding

towers that could be desolate fun parks.

“When you look at something”, they

explained, “you look at ﬁrst one detail and then

another until your memory builds up a complete

picture. You never see anything in detail at once

but the camera can”.

Contemporary critics found the Bechers'

exhibitions workaday, detached and indiffer-

ent: sets of stark black-and-white pictures of

water towers and gas tanks will not engage eve

ryone's sensibility, understandably. But this did

not deter them or their vision. The Bechers were

awed by the ambition of design invested in

objects that were functional tools of the indus-

trial landscape; they were enraptured by the

imagination and effort invested in composing

the perfunctory.

Hilla and Bernd Becher also sensed the cul-

tural value of the likes of the collieries in Wales,

while other watched them fall. They understood

how these structures were markers on the maps

of our age, soon to be erased. “Someone who

concerns himself with scorpions must love

them to a certain extent. And photography is

there precisely to portray what is, not to sort

and reproduce only the good and the beautiful”,

stated Hilla.

I often wonder what the Bechers would docu-

ment of our digital age if they were alive: sadly

Hilla passed away near the end of last year,

Bern in 2007, aged 81 and 75 respectively.

An empty ofﬁce space, sprinkled with sleek

computers slumbering atop linear desks at the

break of dawn maybe; scrubby Chinese ware-

houses stacked with smart devices, just off the

production line and freshly boxed for shipping;

or perhaps the tools fuelling our vast electrical

appetites now: static wind turbines, enervated

energy grids, or thundering power plants. All of

them ﬁxed, purposely static.

Who knows? What is for certain though is that

the Bechers marvelled where others might only

have overlooked as mundane. With clarity and

objectivity, they rendered beauty in places

where it should have few expectations. And in

the end, criticism of their work did not concern

either of them – they were as detached in their

reactions to commentary, as they were in their

working methods. Their legacy is assured, and

their inﬂuence lives on in the work of Andreas

Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Hoffer.

“The question if this is a work of art or not is not

very important for us”, they said. “Probably it

is situated in between the established catego-

ries. Anyway the audience which is interested

in art would be the most open-minded and will-

ing to think about it”.

Transcendent

industrial relations

After Hilla Becher's recent death it's time

to look again at the Bechers oeuvre

by NJ McGarrigle

CULTURE

April 2016 6 1

The same standard

was applied to each

photograph to give

complete objectivity

Bernd and Hilla Becher Gas tanks, 1983-92

6 2 April 2016

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Industrial Landscapes: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA, 1986

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Grube San Fernando, Herdorf, 1961

CULTURE