Bernhard “Bernd” Becher and Hilla Becher were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. For forty years, they photographed disappearing industrial architecture around Europe and North America. To create these works, the artists traveled to large mines and steel mills, and systematically photographed the major structures.

Bernd Becher’s first experiments in photography were in 1957 after studying painting and lithography , at which point he was already interested in functional buildings of industry and started documenting those that he had seen around his hometown of Siegen. Hilla studied photography in Germany and worked as an aerial photographer briefly. The couple met there that year, began collaborating, and married in 1961.

• 

• 

Their black-and-white images served as visual case studies or typologies for industrial structures including water towers, coal bunkers, gas tanks and factories. Their work had a documentary style as their images were always taken in black and white. Their photographs never included people.

They exhibited their work in sets or typologies, grouping of several photographs of the same type of structure. The are well known for presenting their images in grid formations. 

• 

They overlooked beauty and the relationship between form and function. Both subjects addressed the effect of industry on economy and the environment. “I became aware that these buildings [blast furnaces] were a kind of nomadic architecture which had a comparatively short life—maybe 100 years, often less, then they disappear,” the artists said of their work. “It seemed important to keep them in some way and photography seemed the most appropriate way to do that.”

• 

Blast Furnaces 1969−95 comprises twenty-four gelatin silver print photographs taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher over a period of almost thirty years and printed in 2013 under the supervision of Hilla Becher. The prints are arranged in three rows of eight. The photographs were taken across a number of years andin different locations across Europe and the United States.

In addition to blast furnaces, the Bechers created a number of similar ‘typologies’ of industrial architecture, including Gas Tanks 1965–2009 (Tate P81237), Water Towers 1972–2009 (Tate P81238) and Winding Towers (Britain) 1966–97 (Tate P81239). Each of these typologies gathers work from across a number of decades, reflecting the consistency with which the Bechers worked from the start of their collaboration in 1959.

To achieve the ‘perfect chain’ described by the Bechers, each photograph was produced following exactly the same setup, using a large-format camera positioned to capture the form from one of three distinct perspectives (as a detail, in the context of its surroundings, or in its entirety) so as to take up the whole frame of the picture. The flat, neutral quality of the prints was achieved by working in shadowless lighting conditions. Working within these parameters allowed the artists to make consistent groups of ‘types’ irrespective of when the images were taken. In the 1950s and early 1960s the Bechers’ unmediated, dispassionate approach and taxonomical mode of presentation stood in stark contrast to the pictorialist aesthetic dominant in photography at the time, instead drawing on the attitudes of the interwar avant-garde movement Neue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity) and its photographic practitioners such as August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt. 

In 1989 they described their attitude to photography as follows:

The particular strength of photography lies in an absolutely realistic recording of the world. This sets it apart from all other image media; photography can do this better than anything else. And the more precisely it depicts objects the stronger its magical effect on the observer.
(Quoted in Lange 2007, p.189.)

I chose Bernd and Hilla Becher as research as I think their work links directly with the project variation and similarity. By creating different variations of the same objects they are highlighting the structures similarities as well as their differences. Also by displaying their work in a grid format allows for the audience to identify the differences more clearly which is an aspect I will take inspiration from. I also like how the same composition is used for each of the variations which is also something i will take inspiration from as I think it creates structured appearance. To respond to their work i plan to take photos of the same objects in different variations and display them together so they can be compared to one another. Although, I won’t be photographing industrial structures in my images but natural objects as variation in nature is a direction I would like to experiment with in my project.