The Bechers' Industrial Lexicon: in their first full-length interview ever, Bernd and Hilla Becher talk about the collaborative project that has occupied them for more than four decades: photographing and classifying the industrial structures that are even now vanishing from the modern landscape - Interview

Art in America, June, 2002 by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler

Bernd and Hilla Becher have been making photographs together for over 40 years. Their black-and-white prints are almost exclusively concerned with nonarchitectural industrial constructions, the sort that are engineered rather than designed. By grouping photographs of similar structures in grid configurations, the Bechers seek both to establish that these structures constitute a distinct category or "typology" and to show the range of variation that occurs within any given typology. Photographed in the winter months and under gray skies, the buildings reveal their essential physical being.

Bernhard Becher was born on Aug. 20, 1931, in Siegen, Germany, where coal mining and farming were then the primary livelihoods. Hilla Wobeser was born on Sept. 2, 1934, in Potsdam, a town near Berlin that is dominated by the Rococo palace of Sans Souci and its French-style park, built by the Prussian king Frederick the Great. While both Bechers grew up in the era of National Socialism, Hilla also experienced the beginnings of the socialist East German state--the German Democratic Republic (GDR)--first as a student and then as an apprentice to the local photographer who held the archives of the former court photographers of Sans Souci. After she defected to West Germany in 1954, she met the art student Bernd Becher in Dusseldorf then a hub of advertising and finance, administration and art. They married in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built. Both enrolled at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, where, overseen by a sympathetic graphics professor, they began and systematized their photography of industrial buildings. This location was ideal for the Bechers' purpose, since the Ruhr, then Germany's most important industrial center, begins only a few kilometers east of Dusseldorf.

Bernd Becher had been an apprentice in the craft of "decorative painting" from 1947 to 1950, and from 1953 to 1956 studied painting and drawing at the State Art Academy in Stuttgart with the painter Karl Rossing. At that time, he turned to photography to record industrial sites close to his hometown, which he noticed were disappearing fast. When Bernd and Hilla Becher started working together in 1957, it was already clear to them that they would not take on the role of classical industrial photographer and certainly not the viewpoint of socio-romantic workers' photography. Their first project, which they pursued for nearly two decades, was the "Framework Houses," which became their first book with the Munich publisher Schirmer/Mosel (1977) and was recently reprinted jointly with MIT Press.

Their main project in the `60s, though, was heavy industry. A fellowship from the British Council in 1966 brought them to England for six months. It had become evident that whole complexes of heavy industry were being closed and pulled down. In a race against time, the Bechers also photographed industrial sites in Germany, Belgium and Holland. Their first book had seven chapters: "Lime Kilns," "Cooling Towers," "?Blast Furnaces," "Winding Towers," "Water Towers," "Gas Tanks" and "Silos. "Published by printer Eugen Michel's Art Press in Dusseldorf in 1970, the book was titled Anonymous Sculptures and a Typology of Technical Constructions Later, they shot so many images that each of those chapters could have become a book itself, or did.

The German public that thought the spotted Informel canvases of Ernst Wilhelm Nay daring and still found the sculptures of Henry Moore provocatively modern did not exactly embrace the cool documentary-based art of the Bechers. Still, through Konrad Fischer's gallery, New York Pop came to Dusseldorf relatively early, preparing the way for Conceptual art and Minimalism. Richard Long and Carl Andre recognized the Bechers' position as explicitly artistic. The couple's work surfaced in important group shows, such as "Information" (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970), Documenta V (Kassel, 1972), "Contemporanea" (Parcheggio di Villa Borghese, Rome, 1973) and "New Media" (Malmo Konstall, Sweden, 1975). They have been exhibiting with Sonnabend Gallery since 1972, the year they had their first New York solo show. They began to commute between Germany and the U.S. in the `70s, spending so much time in New York that their son, Max, decided to stay there when he was still an adolescent.

In 1976 Bernd Becher joined the faculty of the Art Academy in Dusseldorf to start teaching photography, a subject till then excluded from what was largely a painter's academy. Many of his students have been extremely successful: Candida Hofer, Thomas Struth, Jorg Sasse and, most notably, Andreas Gursky. When Becher retired in 1996, Jeff Wall was chosen to succeed him, but when Wall came to meet the class for the first time, he was confronted by a former Becher student holding a loaded gun. Wall resigned immediately. Bernd Becher was enraged by the academy's passivity during the affair. The chair then went to Thomas Ruff, one of Becher's best-known students, though a bit of a maverick.