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An elegant new edition of Bernd and Hilla Becher's classic black-and-white photographic study of industrial buildings. During their 40-year career, Bernd and Hilla Becher created their own architectural typology as they photographed buildings in a unique style. Basic Forms represents the culmination of their career. Although the subject matter is unglamorous--mine shafts, blast furnaces, cooling towers, water towers, silos, and gas tanks--the Bechers' passion for their work imbues these photographs with beauty and solemnity. The Bechers restricted the conditions of each photograph--taking them early in the morning, on overcast days, so as to eliminate shadow and distribute light evenly. Each image is centered and frontally framed, its parallel lines set on an even plane. There are no human figures, nor are there birds in the sky. The result is a treasury of precisely functional architectural forms, a sublime example of conceptual artistic practices, and a series of "perfect sculptures of a bygone industrial age."
The compelling story of the collaboration of the most important husband-and-wife team in the history of photography; a lavishly illustrated critical assessment of their lifelong project of documenting the industrial landscape of the twentieth century.
A photographic collection, falling somewhere between topographical documentation and conceptual art, catalogs a village of houses built between 1870 and 1914 in the Siegen region of Germany, one of the oldest iron-producing areas of Europe.
Typological, repetitive, at times oddly humorous, Bernd and Hilla Becher's photographs of industrial structures are, in their cumulative effect, profoundly moving. The Becher's serenely cool, disarmingly objective, and notoriously obsessive images of watertowers, gas tanks, grain elevators, blast furnaces, and mine heads have been taken over a period of almost thirty years, under overcast skies, with a view camera that captures each detail and tonality of wood, concrete, brick, and steel. Blast Furnaces represents a continuation of, but also a counterpoint to the Bechers' earlier book Watertowers. There basic functional elements were hidden or clothed in disguises, whereas the 256 duotone pr...
For more than five decades, Bernd (1931–2007) and Hilla (1934–2015) Becher collaborated on photographs of industrial architecture in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States. This sweeping monograph features the Bechers’ quintessential pictures, which present water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and more as sculptural objects. Beyond the Bechers’ iconic Typologies, the book includes Bernd’s early drawings, Hilla’s independent photographs, and excerpts from their notes, sketchbooks, and journals. The book’s authors offer new insights into the development of the artists’ process, their work’s conceptual underpinnings, the photographers’ relationship to deindustrialization, and the artists’ legacy. An essay by award-winning cultural historian Lucy Sante and an interview with Max Becher, the artists’ son, make this volume an unrivaled look into the Bechers’ art alongside their career, life, and subjects.
An encyclopedic collection of all known Becher industrial studies, arranged by building type.
The more than two hundred striking duotone plates in Hilla and Bernd Becher's Industrial Facades continue the famousD?orf photographers' formal investigation of industrial structures, in this case the frontal elevations of factory buildings. Like the Bechers' earlier books on water towers, blast furnaces, and gas tanks, Industrial Facades once again clearly displays their serenely cool, rigorous approach to the structures they photograph as vaariations on an ideal form. The Bechers make no attempt to analyze or explain their subjects. Captions contain only the barest of information: time and place. Industrial Facades covers the whole range of periods and designs representing this building ty...
This volume is an essential addition to the Bechers' body of work, devoted to their images of rock-processing plants and lime kilns taken in Germany, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and Great Britain throughout the 1980s and '90s. Each structure is unique, its details dependent upon the region and the date of its construction, and the book features buildings whose essential function is ancient but remain important today. Although a small number of these images have been included in previous monographs, this is the first publication to showcase a comprehensive collection of the Bechers' study of stonework and lime kilns. Whether presenting single shots or their signature typological grids, the Bechers created a photographic testament to the industrial revolution that so emphatically shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, however, they also captured a much-older manufacturing tradition: the quarrying and processing of stones.
presents four principally different forms of gas holders or gas tanks in 140 photographs taken during the years 1963-1992 in Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States
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