Starting in 1959 and spanning nearly five decades, Bernd and Hilla Becher embarked on an ambitious project to methodically capture images of industrial buildings. They began photographing structures that were once ubiquitous, such as water towers, coal bunkers, blast furnaces, and gravel plants, initially in Germany and then expanding their scope to include Europe and the United States. This effort bridged the gap between fine art and documentary photography. Following a significant retrospective of their work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2022, this exhibition marks the second time the gallery has focused on the Bechers' oeuvre. Featuring thirty-one individual photographs and two sets of sixteen-part typologies, the exhibit showcases the Bechers' impartial approach and its harmony with the serial nature of Minimal and Conceptual art.
The Bechers referred to the subjects of their photography-various elements of the industrial landscape-as "anonymous sculptures," a concept that deeply influenced their neutral photographic technique. They meticulously researched each structure's function and design to capture its essence accurately, adopting a scientific-like precision in their work. Each photo is categorized into one of three perspectives: landscape, singular structure, or close-up detail, with each subject centrally placed in the frame. This disciplined method is showcased in their typologies-collections of images curated to highlight the similarities among different forms. For instance, in "Grain Elevators, 1977-1991," they assembled sixteen images of grain elevators from the United States, Germany, and France. This arrangement allows the viewer to appreciate the structural form and its functionality through a comparison of distinctive and common attributes. Demonstrating the meticulous effort behind these typologies, the Bechers would dedicate years to perfecting a series, adjusting the composition and order of images to achieve a visual harmony they termed klang.
The photographs of the Bechers serve as tributes to an era of industrial prosperity that was quickly fading by the 1970s and 1980s. Their detailed and persistent documentation style, focusing on structures still in use, inadvertently captured not just the "anonymous sculptures" but also the decline of an entire era's infrastructure.
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