Winding Towers, 2 Views, Fosse Lens No 7, Wingles, Nord et Pas-de-Calais, France

Hilla Becher|Bernd Becher|Bernd and Hilla Becher

1967 · Gelatin silver prints · Photographs

Both as artists and teachers, Bernhard and Hilla Becher are among the most important figures in postwar German photography. For the last thirty years, the artists have examined the dilapidated industrial architecture of Europe and North America, from water towers and blast furnaces to the surrounding workers’ houses. The Bechers treat their subjects (in this instance the mineheads that deliver raw materials to the surface), as the exotic specimens of a long-dead species. Photographing against a blank sky and without any pictorial tricks or effects, they allow a perverse beauty to emerge from their subjects’ crazy plethora of forms. Like freakish second cousins to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, these sad industrial behemoths lampoon the Modernist fetishization of technological progress, unwittingly becoming monuments—both pathetic and noble—to an era racing towards its close.

Artist

Hilla Becher|Bernd Becher|Bernd and Hilla Becher

Date

1967

Medium

Gelatin silver prints

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of Pierre Apraxine, 1996