Before heading out to La Collette’s Energy from Waste facility to be escorted around I fist wanted to gather some inspiration for the kind of photography I am expecting to capture. Since the building is covered in windows I can observe that most of what I will be seeing will be complicated machinery and an extensive series of pipes. This kind of structure, along with my aim to show this facility from an intriguing yet still documentary standpoint, means that my next shoot will be focusing on using topographic photography techniques. Because of this, I have decided to look at the amazing photographers Bernhard and Hilla Bercher for their intriguing examples of capturing the beauty of industrial landscapes…

For over 40 years the pair used an 8×10 large-format camera to capture the architecture of industrialisation: water towers, coal bunkers, blast furnaces, gas tanks and factory facades. They did so in an obsessively formalist way that defined their own unique style and made them one of the most dominant influences in contemporary European photography and art. In the early years, with a young son in tow, they travelled across Europe and later the US for weeks at a time in a Volkswagen camper van, cooking and eating by the roadside. When asked in a recent interview why they only photographed industrial structures, Hilla replied: “Because they are honest. They are functional, and they reflect what they do – that is what we liked. A person always is what he or she wants to be, never what he or she is.” For Bernhard, the process of photographing and therefore fixing these brutalist structures forever was rooted in his love of the landscape he grew up in as a child. The huge buildings that dominated and defined his childhood in the Ruhr began to disappear rapidly in Germany’s postwar economic period, and he rightly sensed they would disappear elsewhere – across Europe, Britain and America. I have chosen this amazing couple as an inspiration for my next shoot at the ‘Energy from Waste’ facility because I absolutely love the simple yet fascinating way they have captured these artificial contraptions…

The Bechers were, first and foremost, formalists. “We want to offer the audience a point of view to understand and compare the different structures,” they once said. “Through photography, we try to arrange these shapes and render them comparable. To do so, the objects must be isolated from their context and freed from all association.” Much like the majority of the Becher’s work, this collection above depicts many different blast furnaces in different compositions, all printed in black and white and arranged in grids that emphasised their resemblance – what Hilla once called their “universality”. The meaning behind these images is to create straightforward historical documents of these vanishing industrial structures as well as beautiful topographic images. Although I will not be seeing this type of arrangement when visiting La Collette, I will be taking inspiration from the intricate way they have captured the angles and compositions from in between the pipes and framework.

As well as looking at the Bechers grid style outcomes I will also be taking a lot of inspiration from some of their more simple, close up work. The two photographs on the top row of the contact sheet above show detail captured from a Petrochemical Plant in 1983, Wesseling, Germany. These images depict some of the scenes I expect to find for my next shoot in the ‘Energy from Waste’ facility and I love their dynamic and structural composition. Below them, I have added three more industrial landscapes captured by the famous couple that was originally part of a much larger grid. These images depict old Stonework and Lime Kilns strategically captured against their environments. Alongside her late husband, Hilla saw structures that others might have dismissed as ugly, even threatening, and made them unforgettable.