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Typologies of Industrial Buildings

By Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher
Edited and with an introduction by Armin Zweite
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
134 pp., illus. 1538 b/w. Trade, $75.00
ISBN: 0-262-02565-5.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com

After World War II, Bernd and Hilla Becher began a long collaboration photographing industrial buildings, initially in Germany, and then in other parts of the world. Over the past 40 years, they have built up a distinctive body of work that is immediately recognisable to the viewer. The buildings are photographed in black and white, from a flat frontal perspective; there are no clouds, and the light is the same in every photograph as the Bechers only photograph in spring and autumn on slightly overcast days. Every effort is taken to eliminate distinctive features of the landscape around the buildings, and human beings rarely ever appear. The photographs are exhibited in grids according to the type of building featured. Such an exhibit may feature for example, a grid of 15 photographs of water towers, 12 photographs of gas tanks, or 9 photographs of lime kilns. These buildings are likely to be located in different countries. What they have in common is a basic form attributable to their function and the fact that they are photographed in an identical style.

The distinctive characteristics of the Bechers’ photographic style amount to an attempt to eliminate as far as possible all the expressive and subjective content of the photograph. Exhibiting the photographs in a grid or series invites the viewer to make comparisons, and to note the differences and small variations that distinguish one limekiln or grain elevator from another. Their 40-year body of work thus appears to continue the tradition of creating typologies as found in the work of earlier German photographers such as Karl Blossfeldt, August Sander, and above all, Albert Renger-Patzsch, who believed that because photographs are images produced by machines that they are best suited to representing the machine.

In an interview with Le Monde in 2001, the Bechers attributed the creation of their project to a desire to jump back to this tradition of German photography that existed before the Third Reich and WW II. This allowed them to ignore recent history and the immediate and overwhelming reality of post-war Germany. The Bechers thus found a way to satisfy a documentary impulse by looking outside history and society, by looking elsewhere. Documenting industrial architecture was a way of not looking. Paradoxically, this act of not looking produced work of great visual intensity that rigorously resists any flight into fantasy and any attempt to anthropomorphise the buildings and structures it depicts. But its focus is on everything non-human. The photographs depict a cold, grey world where the viewer scrutinises the exteriors of blast furnaces and coal bunkers and notes the fine details distinguishing them from each other. It is a photography of displacement that is emptied of everything human and has fled to the world of technology.

It seems that the Bechers discovered something radically new to look at through their desire not to look. But what does their achievement amount to? The question, it seems, is still undecided. In the excellent introduction to this book, Armin Zweite shows how their work has been related to minimalist sculpture and conceptual art but suggests that its greater significance amounts to elevating machinery and industrial architecture to something that we not only notice but look at and note as objects worthy of contemplation.

Typologies of Industrial Buildings reproduces all the Bechers’ studies of industrial buildings and contains over 1,500 images arranged just as the Bechers intended them to be seen–in grids. Thus, one page contains 12 photographs of gas tanks with the date and location of each given on the opposite page. Each chapter contains the photographs of a different structure–winding towers, preparation plants, cooling towers, etc. The book is beautifully produced and is the most comprehensive collection of the Bechers’ work available.


 

 




Updated 1st November 2004


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