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Lot Essay
Bernd and Hilla Becher's photographs of the past five decades inventory a full range of industrial architecture in the Western world: together the German husband and wife team have shot hundreds of coal tipples, cooling towers, grain elevators, coal bunkers, water towers, blast furnaces, and the gas tanks seen here. The Bechers have collaborated in a practice that combines the highly skilled, single-image gelatin silver print with the serial structure of the grid. They exhibit and publish their images, grouped by subject, in a grid of six, nine, or fifteen.
Their depiction of vernacular structures demonstrates a stunning consistency. Certain conditions are represented in every Becher photograph: they shoot only on overcast days, so as to avoid shadows; their subjects, captured with a large plate technical camera, are always pictured in isolation, frontally; titles are pithy and captions note only time and location. Within this circumscribed range, however, the photographers have produced an evocative, richly suggestive body of work. They are able to coax an apparently infinite range of tonal gradation from the neutrality of black and white, and they imbue impersonal architecture with a nuance that approaches the particularities of personality. Although these unadorned, purely functional edifices are pictured head-on, in a wholly deadpan manner, the Bechers' technical exactitude encourages the contemplation of their minutest details. While apprehending a grid of similarly shaped structures, whose force derives in part from their juxtaposed uniformity, one notices idiosyncratic differences and structural irregularities. The Bechers call the subjects they photograph "anonymous sculpture," and indeed their central placement imbues them with a certain drama of presence that evokes the austerity of Minimalist forms. As Bernd Becher explains, "It's not a case of photographing everything in the world, but of proving that there is a form of architecture that consists in essence of apparatus, that has nothing to do with design, and nothing to do with architecture either. They are engineering constructions with their own aesthetic" (quoted in Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, "The Bechers' Industrial Lexicon," Art in America, June 2002).
Their depiction of vernacular structures demonstrates a stunning consistency. Certain conditions are represented in every Becher photograph: they shoot only on overcast days, so as to avoid shadows; their subjects, captured with a large plate technical camera, are always pictured in isolation, frontally; titles are pithy and captions note only time and location. Within this circumscribed range, however, the photographers have produced an evocative, richly suggestive body of work. They are able to coax an apparently infinite range of tonal gradation from the neutrality of black and white, and they imbue impersonal architecture with a nuance that approaches the particularities of personality. Although these unadorned, purely functional edifices are pictured head-on, in a wholly deadpan manner, the Bechers' technical exactitude encourages the contemplation of their minutest details. While apprehending a grid of similarly shaped structures, whose force derives in part from their juxtaposed uniformity, one notices idiosyncratic differences and structural irregularities. The Bechers call the subjects they photograph "anonymous sculpture," and indeed their central placement imbues them with a certain drama of presence that evokes the austerity of Minimalist forms. As Bernd Becher explains, "It's not a case of photographing everything in the world, but of proving that there is a form of architecture that consists in essence of apparatus, that has nothing to do with design, and nothing to do with architecture either. They are engineering constructions with their own aesthetic" (quoted in Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, "The Bechers' Industrial Lexicon," Art in America, June 2002).