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 seenin 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 structurewinding towers,
preparation plants, cooling towers, etc.
The book is beautifully produced and is
the most comprehensive collection of the
Bechers work available.