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Reviews
| Industrial Landscapes. By Bernd and Hilla Becher, with an interview by Susanne Lange. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 272 pp., 180 full-page illus. $85 hb (ISBN 0-262-02507-8).
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For more than four decades, Bernd and Hilla Becher have photographed industrial architecture, recording specialized forms (mine head frames, water towers, gasholders, and blast furnaces) in exacting full-frontal images and ordering the results into typologies by function, thereby allowing a comparison of forms. Blast Furnaces (1990), Gas Tanks (1993), Industrial Facades (1995), and Basic Forms (1999), among others, have helped broaden the public's appreciation for the raw, sculptural beauty of industry.
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At first glance, Industrial Landscapes appears to be a departure from the usual Becher formula. Here their lens goes wider to encompass entire landscapes, including the environs (built and natural) of their subjects. The mine, the mill, the quarry, the power station are depicted in their physical contexts, the photographs thereby imparting social and historical information, not only sculptural effect. The Bechers remain enamored with large subjects: mines, iron and steel works, coke plants, quarries, power stations. The subjects range widely over space and time: from wooden coal tipples in eastern Pennsylvania, photographed in the 1970s, to more recent views of the mines of southern Wales, some in intimate embrace with terraced workers' houses.
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In a prefatory interview with the artists (translated from the German by Anne Heritage), Suzanne Lange questions their focus on heavy industry. In reply, the Bechers state an obvious truth: "In comparison to factories with their simple boxlike structures, heavy industry produced ... an inner form that was reflected in the outer appearance" (p. 8).
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When the Bechers began working in the late 1950s, many 19th- and early-20th-century industrial structures were yet standing. The forces of time, abandonment, and modernization posed a dilemma: should they go to Germany's Ruhr Valley, to England "before it was too late," or to the United States "as a reaction to the steel crisis?" Asked about their criteria for choosing their subjects, the Bechers reply, "With landscapes we only took photos of motifs that made good pictures. Our approach was not entirely documentary ... " (p. 10).
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| For industrial archaeologists, that is the essential caveat to the 180 photographs that comprise this handsome book. This is art and not history. The information supplied by the captions is limited to the name of the site, its location, and the date the photograph was taken. Specific site names are often lacking; some, for example, "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 1980," are nearly useless. The viewer is left to puzzle over whether a particular site was active or defunct when the shutter clicked. Does the presence of a kitchen garden or clothes hung out to dry mean that work was still to be had in the adjacent mill? (The absence of smoke rising from the stacks raises doubts.) The rich and arresting views contained in this volume, however, make it worth seeking out, if only for the pleasure to be found in the Bechers' keen industrial eyes. |
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