The Bechers captured what they called the “anonymous sculpture” of water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine tipples, and framework houses in striking black-and-white compositions, which they almost always arranged in gridlike series they referred to as “typologies.” These typologies act as catalogs of industrial design, historic documents of obsolete technologies, and expansions on the possibilities of landscape photography. The Bechers have been the subject of exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Modern Art. They won the Erasmus Prize and the Hasselblad Award, and their work has sold for six figures on the secondary market.

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher are best known for their austere, elegiac, and widely influential photographs of industrial architecture in their native Germany.

The creative duo, Bernd and Hilla Becher, were fascinated by the industrial buildings. While observing the ever-changing industrial landscape, they wanted to preserve the objects from disappearance and to systematize them. Artists' fascination with steel factories or gas refineries was driven by their pursuit of the Zeitgeist reflected in them.

This work shows the water tower photographed in Trier Ehrang, Germany in 1982. The image represents the theoretical concepts of composition held by the artists. Trier-Ehrang water tower also reflects the author's view on the industrialization, which suggests that there is no aesthetic thinking behind such architecture in the first place.

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“ No judgment, we want to be as neutral as possible. All we can do now is to merely describe them visually, and not yet verbally. „

—Bernd and Hilla Becher