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Reviews
| Typologies [of Industrial Buildings]. By Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, with introductory text by Armin Zweite. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. 35 pp. text, 130 plates, notes, 1,500+ images. $75 hb (ISBN 0-262-02565-5).
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Typologies, a coffee table-sized book by the German photography duo Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, provides the reader with two things: an in-depth discussion of the Bechers' photographic philosophy and hundreds of small, beautifully reproduced photographs of industrial subjects in the style that has made Becher a household name in the photographic art world. The book originally accompanied a major retrospective exhibition of the Bechers' work in 2003 titled, Typologien industrieller Bauten.
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The art historian Armin Zweite, director of the Kuntssammlung (art collection) Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf, introduces the photographs with a 24-page, well-referenced overview titled, "Bernd and Hilla Becher's 'Suggestions for a Way of Seeing': Ten Key Ideas." The 10 key ideas around which Zweite organizes his essay are objects and views, preconditions, scope, orientations, contrasts, gaining public acceptance, artistic milieu, anonymous sculptures and criticism, preservation of industrial monuments, and outlook. Simply put, Zweite provides a good account of the backgrounds, influences, careers, and opinions of the Bechers.
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The approach the Bechers take, their photographic style, is called objective photography. In an interview, the Bechers said they "wanted to return to the true sources of photography because it is a very wide ranging means for representing reality" (p. 7). This objective view of photography, replaced by experimental approaches during the 1920s and 1950s, is now recognized as art.
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The Becher style, for those unfamiliar with their work, is devoid of human activity, motion, emotion, shadow, or clouds. The lack of human activity is partially due to the long exposures demanded by their choice of camera equipment—thus, movement is not recorded. Their photographs contain no distractions, involving only the viewer and the subject. This style caught the eye of the art world, raising the Bechers' documentary images to the level of fine art. The skies are flat grey, one constant tonality. Not one shadow plays on the texture of the subject; there is no depth. The treatment of the subject in this way means that all the details are clearly visible, and in the case of large-size reproductions, the viewer is treated to mazes of pipes, cables, beams, textures, forms, and shapes—those elements that make up an industrial artifact.
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Their unique oeuvre or body of work consists of thousands of photographs that, according to the couple, they did not compose but found already composed. To locate their influences, one need look no further than the books that Zweite, author of the introduction, noticed on the Bechers' library shelves. These included the 19th- and 20th-century photographers Eugene Atget, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Karl Blossfeldt, and August Sander, among others, as well as the publications of industrial corporations that used documentary photography in their promotional materials. These industrial photographers also found their compositions; they did not compose them.
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Perhaps the earliest user of photography as a way of building corporate identity was Alfred Krupp. From roughly 1861 to 1875, his company thoroughly, and with an eye toward detail, photographed both new installations and those about to be destroyed, using the pictures in various promotional materials and to uphold tradition. The Krupp factory in Essen included a photographic and lithographic institute as part of its operations. One of Krupp's photographers, Gustav Härtwig, c. 1872, received prizes for his large-format photographs and was successful at exhibitions. The Bechers follow this historic vein, using objective photography to focus on individual structures and to create typologies of specific subjects.
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Before they began working together in 1959, Bernd Becher and Hilla Wobeser had been focusing their cameras on the industrial landscapes of their native West and East Germany, respectively. Hilla had been trained as a photographer in Potsdam in the early 1950s. At the time of their meeting, they had already developed the photographic style that we see in their work today. Unable to make a living doing photography in this manner, Bernd worked as a graphic designer, and Hilla worked as a photographer for an architectural firm in the Düsseldorf region of Germany in the heart of the Ruhr. These high-paying positions allowed them to purchase an automobile, which gained them access to remote mines and smelters. For more than four and one-half decades since their marriage in 1961, the couple has worked together, following ever so closely their heroic, self-restrictive minimalist approach.
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The bulk of Typologies contains more than 1,500 photographs of water towers, gas tanks, winding towers, preparation plants, gravel plants, lime kilns, grain elevators, coal bunkers, blast furnaces, details, and industrial facades located in Europe and the United States. The reproductions, no more than 1.5 by 2 in., do not allow readers to study in detail the various plants, something which is possible in their other books. Instead, these thumbnails force readers to view the variety of shapes and forms, quickly comparing and contrasting the various groupings of industrial subjects.
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The plates, each containing from 6 to 12 photographs in a grid, are laid out on the right-hand pages, while short captions printed in English, German, and French are placed on the facing left-hand pages. The caption information includes location, country, date of capture, and name of the plant. The design, reproduction, and paper stock are of high quality.
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If one desires to put the Bechers and their work into a framework or if readers demand to know who the Bechers are and under what circumstances they came into photography, then this volume is required reading. Zweite's long introduction to the book is the most important part, since many of the book's images have appeared in previous volumes in larger size. Indeed, my first impression on seeing the small photographs was one of dismay. The captured detail of photographs—something less visible in small images like those found in this volume—is what makes for exciting study, and I had previously viewed larger reproductions of many of these photographs and had come to know their work and subjects in this manner. The volume's introduction convinced me, however, that the small image size used is, in fact, well suited for the intent of the book: a capstone for a unique body of artistic work.
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A final note, readers will not find any discussion of the subjects of the photographs contained in Typologies, either by the Bechers or art historian Zweite. The focus is purely on the art form of the industrial subjects shown in the photographs. To learn about the industrial artifacts they photographed, readers will need to go elsewhere.
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