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Reviews
| Cooling Towers. By Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. 248 pp., 236 duotone photographs. $75 hb (ISBN0-262-02598-1).
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An artifact is considered true evidence; a photograph, a true record. Single objects or images, however, are generally not sufficient to establish a fact: a sequence or corroboration is needed. The truth-value of photographs, as with other types of information, requires a serial or cumulative approach. Photographic studies usually supply this data through images taken from different points in space and time. Photographic facts therefore arise, on one hand, in the content of individual images, and, on the other hand, in image sequences, the distinctions and commonalities between images. Our understanding of a subject develops from the relationships put in motion by these two elements of the medium.
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Cooling Towers from MIT Press presents work of the German photographic team of Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher. Part of a lifelong investigation of industrial buildings, Cooling Towers follows similar books focused on industrial building types: Blast Furnaces (1990), Gas Tanks (1993), Mine Heads (1997), and Grain Elevators (2006) among others. In addition to producing their books, the Bechers teach and exhibit widely. In 1990 they received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial, which is among the top honors in international art. Their books constitute a project distinct from, but equally important to, their museum exhibitions. The careful gathering, pairing, and formatting of volumes of photographs is essential to the artists' intentions and to the reader's experience of their works. The Bechers balance content, method, and presentation. The image, how the image is made, and how the created image is encountered—each seems to have an almost equal importance in their projects.
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In the opening pages of Cooling Towers, a short text describes the need for and the history and technology of the towers. A photograph opposite provides an interior view, giving a generic idea of the process. Both image and text anchor what follows: 236 exterior views of cooling towers from Europe and the U.S., photographed between 1959 and 2001. Images are printed one to a page, and each is identified by region, country, and date the photograph was taken. Horizontally and vertically oriented images retain the same size throughout; they have been carefully reproduced as duotones. Apart from the introductory page and image titles, there is no additional text.
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The Bechers' work could be usefully compared to the survey photographs of western North America made in the second half of the 19th century or to the somewhat later photographic guidebooks featuring large industrial sites and natural wonders on equal terms. These projects presented, primarily through photographs, exotic scenes that were outside the experiences of their publics. Both projects use the objectivity of photographs to support the credibility of their improbable subjects. Both have been valued in equal measure as beautiful images, practical information, and thematic exposition.
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Even for seasoned travelers of industrial archives, Cooling Towers is an impressive collection of photographs, and this sustained accumulation constitutes another important characteristic of the book. In exhibitions, the Bechers' images are individually framed and either grouped in grids or lined-up horizontally along the walls. An exhibition room permits an overall image of the work and strengthens the perception of sequences and groups. The photographs in book form function quite differently, as pairs of photographs on opposite pages are favored. Readers are shown two views of the same structure, the same view of two different structures, or two slightly different angles of either similar or contrasting structures. Since the Bechers keep shifting methods of pairing images, the approach to comparing them must keep changing as well. The book requires the sensitive reader to nimbly approach each image from new conceptual directions. The quantity of images hints at an infinity of views, even an endlessness of buildings to be photographed. Truths are being recorded in these photographs, but the opposite is also true: the subject varies endlessly, more quickly than the viewer's ability to follow.
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The book format also encourages arbitrary connections within the whole, as one can easily flip, for example, from horizontal fan-driven steel boxes (179 Germany 1968–180 Germany 1968) to elegant arced cones in wood with steel framing (31 Germany 1965–32 Austria 1982), then to cylinder/cone combinations in concrete (155 Luxembourg 1979–156 Belgium 1971). Through technical and formal evolution, as reflections of collective work and local conditions shift in image after image, readers begin to sense one of the fundamental constants of architecture: to address a need through physical construction.
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The Bechers work with large-format cameras. They arrange their views frontally or with calculated obliquity and, with few exceptions, under overcast skies. This consistency and lack of shadows, amplified by the absence of "real" color, emphasizes form and structure and gives the photographs a stiff serenity. These photographs are delicate, precise, intentional, and finely readable, revealing materials, structural elements, the patterns of weathering, and occasional decorative details. There is an intriguing range of material applications, none of it hidden and rarely embellished. Each new or local solution adapts and replaces materials: wood cladding behind wood framing, wood and steel combined, steel sheeting and truss work, precast- and cast-in-place concrete. Within the fundamental physics of cooling, the advantages of materials are developed and played out. Like the structural qualities of bridges, the forms given to these materials clearly manifest their cooling function.
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The Cooling Towers' photographs also withhold or suppress information, allowing readers no closer to the structures than a view of the whole; no more information is given than the region and date of the photograph. It is as if the photograph, not the image, is the subject. Drawn into the images by details, subtle tones, and the variants of building structures, a viewer cannot exhaust their meaning or decide what they offer. They remain provocatively inconclusive.
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People speak of still photography as opposed to moving pictures; the Bechers' photographs, and this collection in particular, are very still. What is expected of the photographic moment—arrested movement—is cancelled by resolute frontality, absence of moving things, and overcast skies (or is it industrial pollution?). Even weather and time of day seem missing. In some of their projects, the Pennsylvania mine heads for example, a series of views hints at the photographers' circumambulation of the site. Here cooling towers are arranged typologically without regard to location of building or date of photograph. There is the sense, too, that the object in the photograph may no longer exist, further complicating the relationship between the present of the reader, the photographer's moment of work, and the presence of the subject. While the building materials and their weathering tell of a place and moment, the consistency of the photographs and their arrangement into formal sequences draws our thoughts into generalities.
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The Bechers' work may be more useful, ultimately, in the history of photography than the study of industry, but the centrality of photography to historical studies of industry makes their work valuable in both fields. The production of their books is to be celebrated for both extending the nuances of their work as well as for allowing it a wider audience.
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Are photographs true records? Can truth be told by photography? The Bechers part from documentaries that seek to explain or exhaust a subject. Their work is methodical, precise, and consistent but also inscrutable, ambiguous, and open. They have resisted the constant formal development to which most 20th-century artwork adheres; range and depth in their work are achieved by replacing innovation with enigma, progress with accumulation. Their work invites returning looks, a reminder of perhaps the most important thing: viewers are fascinated. The Bechers' pictures of industrial artifacts are also about picturing, and looking at, anything.
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