The incursion and subsequent dominance of the ‘industrial’ as a template if not an ideal in domestic architecture is usually associated with the work of Le Corbusier (1887-1965) and is sometimes reduced to his often quoted remark, that “Une maison est une machine-à-habiter.” (Le Corbusier, 1923, Vers une architecture.) – ‘a house is a machine for living in’.
The influence of the vernacular, unselfconscious architecture of industry that dominated both design and construction for the first half of the 20th century represented the high watermark of faith in the capacity of science, technology and rational man to build a safe and prosperous future for everyone. Precisely engineered modernism, not only in architecture but also in urban planning, would build homes as well as places of work to push aside the inefficiencies and inequalities of the past as well as the false and unnecessary ornament of previous architectural traditions and stand as an heroic monument to progress and confidence in a future built, in pure forms, from iron and concrete.
By the 1960s, the legacy of industrialised conflict, the reality of economic globalisation, and the failure of totalising urban planning had all but extinguished such optimism. Instead the decline, in the West, of traditional industries and the political instability that arose with the development of neoliberal conditions for capitalism was already weakening centrism, collectivism and social democratic forms of government.
The work of Bernd and Hilla Becher occupies precisely this period of transformation, although their representation of it is without any of the violence, disruption or antagonism of the associated politics. Indeed, their work is characterised by its unemotional, dispassionate and detached gaze.
Bernd Becher (1931-2007) was born in Siegen, a mining and metalworking town in West Germany, almost midway between Düsseldorf and Frankfurt and close to the heart of Germany’s coal, iron and steel industry. He studied painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine/ Visual Arts) in Stuttgart and later at the Kunstakademie (Art School) Düsseldorf, where he would go on to teach. In 1957, when a large iron ore mine in his home area was closed, he began to record the site but was frustrated when his drawing could not keep up with the pace of demolition and so he resorted to using a camera. He was to say of this period that he had been ‘overcome with horror when I noticed that the world in which I was besotted was disappearing.’
At around this time, he met Hilla Wobesser (1934-2015), who had been born in Potsdam, East Germany. Both her mother and her uncle were photographers and she had trained at the Lette-Verein in Berlin (a form of technical school for women) and had served an apprenticeship as a photographer. In 1957, while about to start her studies at the Kunstakademie, she was freelancing at the Troost Advertising Agency in Düsseldorf, where she met Bernd, who had been working part-time at the same agency during his vacation. Hilla showed Bernd how to obtain better technical results from his camera. They worked together from this point on, marrying in 1961.
For the next 50 years, they travelled together through Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, North America and the UK (incl. South Wales in 1966) taking photographs of what was to become the ‘elephant’s graveyards of architecture. Coal bunkers, cement works, complexes of factory buildings, grain elevators, water coolants and blast furnaces.’
Their work has been described as,
“not only the most scrupulously photographed, encyclopaedic documentation of industrial structures in the western world – a huge feat in itself – but also arguably the most extraordinarily beautiful photography of our times.”
Their photographic habits changed hardly at all throughout their career. Their subjects were shot wherever possible in flat light, face on and often with a low horizon. More in the manner of portraits, their subjects occupied the full frame. They deliberately excluded any artistic manipulation of light, composition or perspective that were more typical of the medium at the time, forcing attention on to the subject and not the photograph. They refused to dramatize, idealise or romanticise the subjects of their images. Theirs was an inartistic, anonymous aesthetic; ‘alienated quotations of reality’ as Lange describes them (Lange, 2004 p. 7), recorded with ‘prosaic precision’.
The Bechers referred to their subjects as ‘anonyme Skulpturen’ (‘anonymous sculptures’) – the title of their first book, published in 1970 – suggesting that their form and the way in which they demonstrated the ‘natural’ variation that emerges in human engineering is what defines them, more than simply their function. As Hilla indicated in a 2012 interview:
I definitely regard them as sculptures. There is such variety of form and such interesting design, although the design is not consciously aesthetic.
It is this concern with the form of the object that is often used to link the Bechers with conceptual art although this was an association that the Bechers rejected. (See Stimson, 2004 for a longer account of the Bechers’ artistic lineage.)
In the same 2012 interview, Hilla Becher, described their approach as unlike that of photographers and more like that of the naturalist, collecting samples;
We didn’t really see [our subjects] as artists, but we saw it more like natural history or something like that. So we also used the methods of natural history books, like comparing things, having the same species in different versions. So the typology is nothing but comparing and giving it shape. Giving it some sort of possibility to be looked at otherwise it would just be heaps of paper.
This approach was most obviously reflected in the exhibition of their work which was often in the form of sets of images arranged in a grid. This arrangement invited close scrutiny of the similarities and differences of what might have been regarded as nondescript, uniform, merely functional objects in the landscape; a form of comparative morphology. What this reveals is that while function may direct form, it does not determine it and that there are endless nuances to be found in the design and construction of what are ostensibly the same kind of building. Beyond this, it encourages a consideration of our aesthetic preferences and how we determine what is to be looked at in our environment and how we look – what is prized: what is rejected; what is closely observed: what is passed over; what has beauty (of form): and what does not.
By problematising and thematising the built environment in this way, through their photography and through their teaching at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, the Bechers have influenced a number of photographers, including Andrea Gursky, Candida Höfer (libraries), Thomas Struth (people looking at pictures) and possibly Ed Ruscha (e.g. 26 Gas Stations) as well as being instrumental in developing interest in the preservation of the industrial past
The Bechers are accused of omitting the context of their images (although they often shot landscapes containing their subjects providing a sense of their immediate location). In particular, they are accused of paying no attention to the specific historical context of the part played by German heavy industry during the Second World War. This is to miss the point of their work entirely and is akin to requiring an appreciation of the Sistine Chapel to be refracted through 2000 years of religious oppression. The Bechers’ wilfully apolitical images represent a critical break in the making of art in Germany which had been compelled to act in the service of the Reich or on behalf of the state in the DDR for the decades prior to and during the Bechers’ career.
As Collins (2002) has noted,
The Bechers’ purpose has always been to make the clearest possible photographs of industrial structures. They are not interested in making euphemistic, socio-romantic pictures glorifying industry, nor doom-laden spectacles showing its costs and dangers. Equally, they have nothing in common with photographers who seek to make pleasing modernist abstractions, treating the structures as decorative shapes divorced from their function … These are the lines on the face of the world. The photographs are portraits of our history.
The Bechers’ work can attract a certain melancholy though. For example, their images of the collieries of South Wales, near where I live, express the passage of a time imbued with a sense of hiraeth (Welsh – a sense of longing for home), but maybe for a time and place that never really existed. The following gallery is prefaced by one of the Bechers’ less well known context setting landscapes.
Ferndale Colliery, Treherbert, South Wales, 1966 
Tower Colliery, Hirwaun, South Wales, 1966 
Great Western Colliery, Shaft 2, Pontypridd, South Wales, 1968 
Bwllfa Colliery, Cwmdare, South Wales, 1966 
Prince of Wales Colliery, Ebbw Vale, South Wales, 1974 
Deep Duffryn Colliery, Mountain Ash, South Wales, 1966
But it is not the purpose of these photographs to fictionalise, to explain or to console.
The Bechers’ work does not elaborate on the passing of the industrial age beyond the images themselves. There is no additional editorial, commentary or soundtrack. The narrative is contained in the direct representation of the buildings.
Buddhists sometimes refer to the ‘thusness’ of things (Tathātā, Skr.) meaning the state of things as they are; the momentary coalescence of all of the causes and conditions that constitute existence and the Bechers images speak to this understanding of material objects. The subjects of the Bechers’ images are presented as they stood at a single moment. The burden of explanation and interpretation lies entirely with the observer.
In many ways, the Bechers are truer to the tradition of ‘blueprint’ architectural photography than Robert Adams although the Bechers were also included in the New Topographics exhibition of 1975. What both the Bechers and Adams do however is to refocus our attention on what is to be seen in what we might otherwise fail to notice. Both see in the material fabric of our homes and places of work the fundamental processes that build our social structures and social relations. They see, in the small, everyday things of life the working out of the otherwise invisible forces that shape the way in which society is constituted. In so doing, they also ask us to question what we are looking for as well as what we are looking at.
References:
Lange, S. (2004) ‘History of Style – Industrial Buildings. The Photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’ in Becher, B. and Becher, H. Grundformen Munich: Schirmer/ Mosel
