Bernd Becher Knihy

Duotone photographs, Documents imperiled industrial structures.

Typological, repetitive, and at times oddly humorous, Bernd and Hilla Becher's photographs of industrial structures create a profoundly moving cumulative effect. Their cool, objective, and obsessive images of water towers, gas tanks, grain elevators, blast furnaces, and mine heads span nearly thirty years and are captured under overcast skies with a view camera that highlights the details and textures of wood, concrete, brick, and steel. This collection serves as both a continuation and counterpoint to their earlier work, focusing on the purely functional and exposed architecture of blast furnaces, which symbolize the steel industry. These structures, akin to giant cone-shaped stoves, dominate the landscapes of cities like Pittsburgh and Birmingham, reminiscent of how religious buildings once defined medieval cityscapes. The photographs, taken between 1961 and 1989, reveal the unique characteristics and eerie presence of blast furnaces across Great Britain, Belgium, France, Austria, Germany, and the United States. The Bechers, who began their collaborative work in 1957 studying workers' houses in Germany, are part of a lineage of German photographers who shaped "objective" photography. Their work will be featured at the Dia Art Foundation galleries in New York and represent Germany at the 1990 Venice Biennale.

A photographic collection, falling somewhere between topographical documentation and conceptual art, catalogs a village of houses built between 1870 and 1914 in the Siegen region of Germany, one of the oldest iron-producing areas of Europe.

An encyclopedic collection of all known Becher industrial studies, arranged by building type.

Bernd & Hilla Becher's photography can be considered conceptual art, typological study & topological documentation. They have been photographing cooling towers since the 1960s. This volume contains photographs of cooling towers - in their different shapes and structural forms - from Belgium, England, France, Germany, Holland & the US

The great photographers of industrial landscapes offer a stunning retrospective of their most compelling work, featuring coal mines, iron ore mines, steel mills, power stations with cooling towers, lime kilns, and grain elevators, among other subjects.