Blast Furnaces, Heads, Frontal Views

Bernd and Hilla Becher collaboratively photographed industrial structures throughout Europe and the United States in the mid-1950s, including cooling and water towers, grain elevators, framework houses, and blast furnaces. They adopted a consistent viewpoint that facilitated comparative analysis and, beginning around 1970, began calling their depersonalized collections of architectural forms "anonymous sculptures." Grouped according to type or function, these typologies are presented in grids or sequences that prompt attention to shared motifs and structural principles. Although the Bechers were greatly influenced by Minimal and Conceptual Art, their approach also has historical roots. As Hilla Becher 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 plants of the same variety or animals of the same species are compared with one another on the individual pages of the lexicon."