© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher
***Water Towers*** 1967–80

Written by Nikkala Kovacevic
Copy Edited by Erin Pedigo
Photo Edited by Clara Pysh and Yanting Chen

Bernd and Hilla Becher’s methodical and scientific style is easily recognizable and is now available for viewing in a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition showcases the series the couple were perhaps most known for; their extensive cataloging of twentieth-century industrial architecture such as grain silos and water towers, mostly located in Western Europe. The Becher’s wanted to capture this specific series of subjects, but also this disappearing industrial style, as it faded from the countryside. The results of this quest to halt time during immense change and progress have now culminated in this collection, the most comprehensive to date. More than 450 images fill this exhibition, put together by Jeff Rosenheim, the museum’s curator of photography.

© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher
***Cooling Tower, Caerphilly, South Wales, Great Britain 1996***

This collection provides a unique look into the personal archives of the couple, responsible for cultivating their looming, calculated style. They photographed various industrial structures such as water towers, gas tanks, and furnaces, almost entirely located in Germany. In many of their previous exhibitions, the couple would organize their photographs into “typologies,” placing photographs of similar structures into grid- like patterns in order to create a full study on a specific architectural style.

Alongside these more traditional works of the Becher’s, the exhibition also features some of Bernd’s personal sketches, also of industrial scenes, and some of Hilla’s non-architecture focused photography, in this case mainly of botany. Each reflects the couple’s obsession with capturing both manufactured and organically occurring structures. In fact, Hilla’s botanical photography does not feel out of place among the other industrial photographs. The Becher’s captured these structures in a way that reflects natural or herpetological photography, the subjects both still and seemingly living all at once.

© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher
***Gravel Plants 1988-2001***

© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher
**Folder with notes on travel in the United States 1987**

The Becher’s respected the size of force of the structures they captured; this is obvious, giving each a sort of ominous effect. The couple treated each as its own beast, grand and illusive enough that they warrant photographic evidence. This contributes to the presentation of their typologies; various structures displayed in a manner allowing for their observation and comparison, much like how one could compare a series of photographs of insects or plants. Each structure feels chosen for its individual value as an industrial structure, and not for aesthetics, but there is artistry apparent.

Acting with the goals of both preservation and artistic rendering, the seemingly bleak and looming subject matter gains importance in its stylistic contradictions. Studies like Framework Houses of the Siegen Industrial Region (Slated Gable Sides, Germany) force the viewer to engage in an act of comparison, simultaneously imbuing each structure with a personality of its own, as well as making a statement about the prevalence of these landmark industrial structures. To view this collection under the lens of scientific study is also to award the couple’s artistic style with the respect and sanctity they intended to bring through their work.