“The question ‘is this a work of art or not?’ is not very interesting for us.” – BERND AND HILLA BECHER
Bernd And Hilla Becher are a husband and wife duo from Germany who decided to photograph architectural forms which they named “anonymous sculptures”. They photographs many structures such as:
- Water towers
- Coal silos
- Blast furnaces
- Lime kilns
- Grain elevators
- Preparation plants
- Oil refineries
- Coal bunkers
- Winding towers
- Breakers (ore, coal, stone)
- Steel mills
- Factory facades
They named their works ‘typologies’ which represented their collections of grouped images in small symmetrical squares. They categorized these photos by the buildings functions. An example of their signature image of smaller photographs which have been grouped together:
Their work can be seen as conceptual art, and took place over course of 40 years. Their chapters all contributed to different structures and were all organised due to typologies and are laid out into 12 images into a uniform arrangement. There is over 1500 different images,, and they have received many famous awards such as:
- The Golden Lion
- -The 1990 Venice Biennal
- The 2002 Erasmus Award
I find Bernd and Hilla Becher’s particularly interesting because their work is most definitely minimal and conceptual, which sets their work aside from other artists, as they focus on one main object taking up the majority of the picture, rather than multiple objects being the subject of a photo.