Description
Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing together in 1959, documenting architectural forms they collectively referred to as "anonymous sculpture." For close to fifty years, they documented water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine tipples, framework houses, and other vernacular industrial architecture — often technologies on the verge of obsolescence. They produced impeccable black and white photographs using a large-format camera under overcast skies to record shadowless front and side elevation views. Arranging matched photographs in a grid, they produced "typologies," grouping buildings by function and underscoring the similarities and differences between structures.
