Basic Forms of Industrial Buildings

by Hilla Becher, Bernd Becher

There is no end to the awards and prizes honoring the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. After the Golden Lion at the 1990 Venice Biennial, the 1995 Goslar Kaiserring, and the Erasmus Prize awarded to the photographers in Amsterdam in 2002, they received the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation International Award for outstanding accomplishments in photography in November 2004. On the occasion of this tribute we are enlarging our 13-volume Becher edition with another publication. During their 40-year career the Bechers kept focusing on the same subjects over and over again, creating an invaluable photographic encyclopedia of industrial structures. Basic Forms presents 61 photographs covering the entire range of Becher motifs—water towers, cooling towers, gas tanks, winding towers, blast furnaces, gravel plants, lime kilns, and grain elevators.

Genres: Photography, Art, Architecture, Design, Reference

143 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1993

About the author

With her husband Bernd, Hilla Becher photographed industrial buildings and the two displayed them in grid formats.

Reviews

[Declan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a curious beauty about industrial buildings; their form as well as their function. The hundreds of marks of repetitive activities carried out each day mixes with wonder and curiosity about the people who carried out those tasks. There is too a kind of rhythm and poetry in the shape and design of water towers, cooling towers, gas tanks, winding towers, blast furnaces, gravel plants, lime kilns, and grain elevators; each of them similar to all the others of their kind, but also unique to the particular hands that designed and put them together.

There is nothing romantic or nostalgic about the way that Bernd and Hilla Becher viewed and photographed these structures. They present them in a simple, but georgeously stark, black and white, like this:



I can only imagine what a joy it must have been for the two of them to visit all of the places they photographed; perhaps a nuisance too some days, but just imagine saying to the one you love: "I think we should go to Wesseling near Cologne today to photograph the gasometer they have there. Will I drive or will you?" Then off you go, arrive there, talk to some of the workers on site, clear permission with a foreman, set up your equipment and take a precise, unambiguous image of the gasometer and then drive into the town for something to eat, or perhaps you have your own picnic: sandwiches, lemon biscuits, real lemonade. What a life!

I was lucky enough to see an exhibition of the Becher's work several years ago, since when I have thought of them as two of the finest exponents of photography ever. Their work quietly celebrates the integrity of workers without ever actually showing them. Instead we see the amazing, absurd or aesthetic architecture of a way of life that may not exist any more, but which was captured forever by the wonderful vision of the Bechers.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Does what it says on the tin. Great pictures of Basic Forms.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Because their way of perceiving a subject invariably depends on its design, complex constructions and sculptures are always photographed from several angles. These serial documentations include at least a frontal and a perspective view and can comprise as many as eight different shots taken at 45–degree intervals around the object. […] What might be taken here for formalist finesse is actually the most perfect descriptive depiction of the real object, which the sequence of images presents as a three–dimensional structure. […] The segmentation of whole plants and the focussing on […] [single] building types for presentation in relation to one another in new groups of images ultimately amounts to a new form of photographic collage or montage which basically takes its cue from human perception" (Lange, pgs. #13–14).

[Nat]

After six months of California sunshine, I need to prepare for going back to Europe for a couple of months. Looking at shadowless pictures of industrial buildings photographed on seamlessly overcast days is step 1 in that process.

****April 16, 2007 ****
I like the Becher's photography for the same reason that I like looking at pictures of tanks or airplanes: the pictures depict incredibly complex and massive pieces of machinery in inexhaustible detail.

My favorites are the French blast furnaces.

[Adam Norwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great collection of duotone plates of Bernd and Hilla Becher's work. My only wish is that this volume included more text (although the 7-page introductary essay it does include is useful).