Gasbehälter, Wesseling, Köln, D,

Bernd and Hilla Becher. Basic Forms Bernd and Hilla Becher were among the most important documentary photographers of our time. The couple photographed industrial architecture, such as winding towers, gas holders and furnaces in Germany, England, France and the USA, from the end of the 1950s onwards. The majority of these industrial buildings, erected in the 19th or the beginning of the 20th century, lost their original function in the post-industrial era and were threatened with imminent demolition; many of them no longer exist. Not only the precise documentation of a building but of whole building types lay at the centre of their archaeology-like interest. To do this they developed a specific photographic grammar with which technique-related and methodological processes could always be repeated: each object is isolated in a light that is as diffuse and shadowless as possible and pictured from a slightly raised viewpoint so that the whole form can be made visible without distortion. Grouped together in tableau-like typologies of nine or more pictures the viewer can study the external form of appearance of each object and compare these with others of the same function. Over a period of several decades a unique archive of industrial functional buildings was created in this way that is not only of inestimable cultural and historical value but, at the same time, stakes an autonomous artistic claim. The Bechers also showed their works as individual pictures for the first time at an exhibition in the New York Dia Art Foundation – a form of presentation that placed the focus on the formal and sculptural properties of each object.