They are renowned for images of Germany's ominous water towers and monolithic coal bunkers, but the Bechers' body of work, majestic though it may be, belongs to the past now
For over 40 years, Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed the architecture of industrialisation: water towers, coal bunkers, blast furnaces, gas tanks and factory facades. They did so in an obsessively formalist way that defined a style, and made them one of the most dominant influences in contemporary European photography and art.
At Sprueth Magers in London, these five industrial series are on show in their characteristic grid formations alongside a selection of single, large-scale images. It makes for an intriguing exhibition, the first British overview of their vast body of work since the group show Cruel and Tender at Tate Modern in 2003, and a reminder, if needed, of their relentlessly detached vision. If you are looking for photography that engages the emotions and the intellect, this is probably not the place to go.
The pair met while working for an advertising agency in Düsseldorf in 1957. They had both studied painting, but soon discovered a shared fascination with the vernacular industrial architecture of the Ruhr region: the giant, monolithic sculptural forms that dominated the surrounding landscapes. From the start, they were rigorous, photographing in the grey early morning light, often from a distance, to show the scale of the towers and tanks against nearby buildings or objects. In one photograph of a cooling tower, a tiny street sign is visible in the foreground; in another, a row of what looks like miniature Christmas trees stand in the foreground.
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Their approach soon became even more rigorous, with each structure being photographed from a similar angle on a large-format plate camera. The grids were arranged to highlight the formal similarities of each structure, which, as their images of water towers in Detroit show, was constant around the world – but also their looming, ominous presence.
The Bechers approached photography the way a botanist might approach the cataloguing of flora and fauna. Indeed, at the Arles Photography Festival this year in an illuminating group show, Typology, Taxonomy and Serial Photography, their work was contrasted to that of Karl Blossfeldt, who once said "the plant must be valued as a totally artistic and architectural structure". Alongside the equally rigorous August Sander, who photographed ordinary German people in a similarly detached way, Blossfeldt embraced a scientific style that approached pure classification. The Bechers are heirs to that way of looking.
There was more to it than that, though. Bernd Becher's fascination with industrial architecture was rooted in his childhood in the Ruhr, and he was acutely aware that the mega-structures throughout Germany, Europe and America would soon disappear from the landscape, just as the ones around his home had as Germany moved into a new, postwar economic era. He once said he "was overcome with horror when I noticed that the world in which I was besotted was disappearing".
Wandering through Sprueth Magers, I was struck as always by the underlying sense of loss and melancholy that emanates from these photographs: you are looking at a lost world, however soul-destroying that world was for those who had to live and work in it.
The images range from the toweringly impressive – ringed structures that circle giant gas tanks – to the claustrophobic – interiors of a petrochemical plant in Wesseling, photographed as late as 1983, could be stills from David Lynch's Eraserhead.
There is beauty here, too, and not least in the details: the intricate steelwork and repeated motifs of the British gas tanks speak of the craft as well as functionality of industrial design. The same cannot be said of the industrial facades, which are almost Dickensian in their bleakness, or the extraordinary shots of looming mine heads which seem Soviet in their scale and dominance over the landscape. They also resemble watchtowers, and cannot help but summon up visions of Germany's darker 20th-century history.
Bernd Becher died, aged 75, in 2007. By then, his and Hilla's influence was widely acknowledged, not just in terms of their own work, which fascinated Stephen Shore as he began photographing America, but because of their roles as teachers at Düsseldorf's Kunstakademie, where their pupils included Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and Andreas Gursky.
But the Bechers' way of working belongs to the past now. This is a requiem for a lost world and shows that, through the passing of time, even that which was once considered purely functional and even ugly, can attain beauty when seen through the eyes of the most attentive photographers.