Pitheads–Perspective Views

For over 50 years, Bernd and Hilla Becher collaboratively photographed industrial structures throughout Europe and the United States. The artists came to consider the buildings “anonymous sculptures,” and they grouped them according to type or function—in this case, pithead towers above mine shafts. The images are presented in a grid, to emphasize both formal differences and overall sameness. Although the Bechers were greatly influenced by the reductive, serial formats common in Minimalist and Conceptual Art of the 1960s, Hilla once explained, “Our idea of showing the material has much more to do with the 19th century, with the encyclopedic approach used in botany or zoology, where . . . species are compared with one another on the individual pages of the lexicon.”