The Bechers' Industrial Lexicon: In their first full-length interview ever, Bernd and Hilla Becher talk about the collaborative project that has occupied them for more than four decades: photographing and classifying the industrial structures that are even now vanishing from the modern landscape.

By Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, Art in America, June, 2002

Bernd and Hilla Becher have been making photographs together for over 40 years. Their black-and-white prints are almost exclusively concerned with nonarchitectural industrial constructions, the sort that are engineered rather than designed. By grouping photographs of similar structures in grid configurations, the Bechers seek both to establish that these structures constitute a distinct category or "typology" and to show the range of variation that occurs within any given typology. Photographed in the winter months and under gray skies, the buildings reveal their essential physical being.

Bernhard Becher was born on Aug. 20, 1931, in Siegen, Germany, where coal mining and farming were then the primary livelihoods. Hilla Wobeser was born on Sept. 2, 1934, in Potsdam, a town near Berlin that is dominated by the Rococo palace of Sans Souci and its French-style park, built by the Prussian king Frederick the Great. While both Bechers grew up in the era of National Socialism, Hilla also experienced the beginnings of the socialist East German state--the German Democratic Republic (GDR)--first as a student and then as an apprentice to the local photographer who held the archives of the former court photographers of Sans Souci. After she defected to West Germany in 1954, she met the art student Bernd Becher in Dusseldorf then a hub of advertising and finance, administration and art. They married in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built. Both enrolled at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, where, overseen by a sympathetic graphics professor, they began and systematized their photography of industrial buildings. This location was ideal for the Bechers' purpose, since the Ruhr, then Germany's most important industrial center, begins only a few kilometers east of Dusseldorf.

Bernd Becher had been an apprentice in the craft of "decorative painting" from 1947 to 1950, and from 1953 to 1956 studied painting and drawing at the State Art Academy in Stuttgart with the painter Karl Rossing. At that time, he turned to photography to record industrial sites close to his hometown, which he noticed were disappearing fast. When Bernd and Hilla Becher started working together in 1957, it was already clear to them that they would not take on the role of classical industrial photographer and certainly not the viewpoint of socio-romantic workers' photography. Their first project, which they pursued for nearly two decades, was the "Framework Houses," which became their first book with the Munich publisher Schirmer/Mosel (1977) and was recently reprinted jointly with MIT Press.

Their main project in the `60s, though, was heavy industry. A fellowship from the British Council in 1966 brought them to England for six months. It had become evident that whole complexes of heavy industry were being closed and pulled down. In a race against time, the Bechers also photographed industrial sites in Germany, Belgium and Holland. Their first book had seven chapters: "Lime Kilns," "Cooling Towers," "?Blast Furnaces," "Winding Towers," "Water Towers," "Gas Tanks" and "Silos. "Published by printer Eugen Michel's Art Press in Dusseldorf in 1970, the book was titled Anonymous Sculptures and a Typology of Technical Constructions Later, they shot so many images that each of those chapters could have become a book itself, or did.



The German public that thought the spotted Informel canvases of Ernst Wilhelm Nay daring and still found the sculptures of Henry Moore provocatively modern did not exactly embrace the cool documentary-based art of the Bechers. Still, through Konrad Fischer's gallery, New York Pop came to Dusseldorf relatively early, preparing the way for Conceptual art and Minimalism. Richard Long and Carl Andre recognized the Bechers' position as explicitly artistic. The couple's work surfaced in important group shows, such as "Information" (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970), Documenta V (Kassel, 1972), "Contemporanea" (Parcheggio di Villa Borghese, Rome, 1973) and "New Media" (Malmo Konstall, Sweden, 1975). They have been exhibiting with Sonnabend Gallery since 1972, the year they had their first New York solo show. They began to commute between Germany and the U.S. in the `70s, spending so much time in New York that their son, Max, decided to stay there when he was still an adolescent.

In 1976 Bernd Becher joined the faculty of the Art Academy in Dusseldorf to start teaching photography, a subject till then excluded from what was largely a painter's academy. Many of his students have been extremely successful: Candida Hofer, Thomas Struth, Jorg Sasse and, most notably, Andreas Gursky. When Becher retired in 1996, Jeff Wall was chosen to succeed him, but when Wall came to meet the class for the first time, he was confronted by a former Becher student holding a loaded gun. Wall resigned immediately. Bernd Becher was enraged by the academy's passivity during the affair. The chair then went to Thomas Ruff, one of Becher's best-known students, though a bit of a maverick.

By the 1980s the Bechers' typologies were becoming museum staples. Chosen by Klaus Bussmann to share the German pavilion at the 1990 Venice Biennale with Reinhard Mucha, the Bechers proudly displayed (among many other series and images) "Industrial Facades" (from Oberhausen, Germany, to Steubenville, Ohio), a panel of"Blast Furnaces" in an oblong grid of 24 images and even "Post-War Houses," drab German architecture of the `60s, uptight and spotlessly clean. The typologies, simple only at first sight, in fact included three basic variations: similar views of similar objects, similar views of rather diverse objects (city water towers, mostly), and different views of a single object. The Bechers even blended these approaches, using, for instance, mainly similar views of different blast furnaces in one panel but slipping in just one or two examples taken from differing vantages, thus asking the viewer to look very closely.

While it is obvious that the Bechers were traveling widely and photographing obsessively, their typologies did not reveal that they were in fact documenting complete industrial plants, with almost any type of building included within them. The Hannibal colliery at Bochum, closed down on Mar. 31, 1973, was documented in depth by the Bechers during the 18 months that followed. It was then demolished. Rudi Fuchs, when he was the director of the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands (1975-87), bought for the collection 85 photographs, representing 19 groups of structures at Hannibal, including overall views of the site, which look quite un-Becheresque. The Hannibal portfolio was on loan for a Becher show at Cologne's Photographische Sammlung?SK-Stiftung, an institution which is closely linked with the Bechers and also keeps the archives of August Sander. Titled "Coal Mines: Object and Description" [Apr. 24-0ct. 15, 1999], the exhibition surveyed 10 portfolios, which, each in its own way, extensively documented various industrial plants. After the show, these portfolios, except for the one Fuchs had bought for the Van Abbemuseum, remained with SK-Stiftung in Cologne. It became clear that the Becher style, which could be described as the portrait of a building, was only part of the story. Next, the 85 photographs of "Zech Hannibal" were published as a Schirmer book. It contains a (near) reprint of Fuchs's introduction from the Van Abbemuseum catalogue of 1981 (Bernd und Hilla Becher), while the catalogue for the Dutch show remains the most reliable source for a systematic view of the Bechers' approach to industrial archeology.

In his introduction, Fuchs states "that the question of whether Bernd and Hilla Bechers' work is a work of art is not so very interesting. " He points out, though, that "obviously only in art could they find the motivation"for their gigantic task, and then concludes that they work precisely as artists do, since they rigidly limit their interest to a few chosen subjects and refuse to let themselves be distracted by anyone, scientist or historian, who would present a different visual approach.

While "Coal Mines" was on view in Cologne, I visited the Bechers for the first time, to speak with them for the Frankfurter Rundschau, a German national daily. The Bechers were then living in a former paper mill which they had rented decades earlier and had renovated to use as their living quarters. At the end of a dead-end street, one entered a garden, beyond which lay a flat green field that marks the border between the regions of "Rhein" (business) and "Ruhr" (heavy industry). Parked in the garden was a white Volkswagen bus, dating from the `90s. This former factory was unexpectedly whimsical inside, containing a huge darkroom, a library in an elevated room, and more rooms for work and storage. Although the Bechers lived there, the place had all the coziness of a raw artist's loft. We sat down together at the kitchen table.

The Bechers proved to be an amiable couple, though each has a willful streak and a tendency to interrupt the other. They were extremely accurate in answering questions, Bernd preferring to show things rather than to explain them. I returned once to prepare for this interview and twice more to record it (on June 14 and Sept. 27, 2000). At the end of each visit the Bechers insisted that I have a good meal in one of the restaurants or pubs in the center of Kaiserwerth, once a proud little town and now a part of Dusseldorf. As the Bechers' paper mill was damp and always in danger of being flooded by the small river behind the house, they have since contracted with the authorities of Kaiserwerth to use a former school building to work and live in. began to move in late 2001. The new place will also have a semipublic showroom in which to present some of their work.




Ulf Erdmann Ziegler: How did you meet, and how did you arrive at your art?

Bernd Becher: We met in the Troost Advertising Agency in Dusseldorf. It was 1957, I was 26.

UEZ: Had you finished your studies at the academy?

BB: No, I had just transferred from Stuttgart to Dusseldorf the same year, and worked at Troost in order to finance my studies.

UEZ: And you, too, Mrs. Becher?

Hilla Becher: I already had a job in the agency, a permanent position. Initially I was very happy there, but then saw that I didn't really want to be in advertising. I asked myself what I should do and thought that the best thing would be to go back to school. So I applied to the Dusseldorf Academy of Art. I was accepted, although at the time there was no photography department at the academy. I couldn't paint. But it turned out that there were a few teachers who were interested in photography after all, and there was money available for equipment. As a student, I was given the job of buying it.

UEZ: What did you buy?

HB: A view camera and accessories.

BB: The enlarger was a Durst 13 by 18 centimeters.

HB: Very professional, 13 by 18, baths and trays and everything that went with them. Thus everyone in the class could use this equipment. At that time, conditions were difficult, renting large premises unaffordable and buying such equipment ourselves impossible. After we met and decided to work together, that was the opportunity to get started.

UEZ: So you were fellow students at the academy.

HB: Yes, until 1961.

UEZ: Then you had both finished your studies?

HB: There was no such thing as having finished. You stopped when you thought it enough.

BB: Essentially we had finished long before, but we stayed on at the academy, because this darkroom was there, to put it simply.

UEZ: Mrs. Becher, you are trained as a photographer. Where were you trained?

HB: I took up photography on my own, at the age of 12 or 13, with very inadequate means: it was soon after the war, and the only supplies were from before the war. But one could get hold of what was needed, one way or another, on the black market. My mother had learned photography in her youth. She was a photographer, but didn't continue with it. She bought me a camera and let me mix up a few chemicals. All that took place in Potsdam, so already in the GDR. Later on I found myself a proper apprenticeship.



UEZ: With whom did you train?

HB: With an elderly man named Walter Eichgrun, who was--like his father and grandfather--a photographer for the Prussian court in Potsdam. He had an enormous archive of large plates dealing with the court. Political events at court, photographed in the 19th-century manner, with cameras and lenses of the period. There hadn't been anything else for a long time, again because of the war. The studio was as if it were from the time of the Empire, with black ebony furniture and heavy drapes; we called it "the crypt." It was clear to me, however, that it was a very good apprenticeship. Eichgrun photographed meticulously and had a very good knowledge of composition, light and shadow, perspective. He was also prepared to explain it. He had a studio that took up a whole floor of a house in Potsdam, and he did everything he was commissioned to do--portraits, shots of objects and a lot of architecture. He was very good at it and highly sought after. At the time I worked with him, he was commissioned to photograph Sans Souci, the park, the palaces, the rooms, the statues. I always went along, dragging odds and ends of equipment.

This was from about 1951 to 1953. I had left school early. That had quite a bit to do with the fact that I couldn't always keep my mouth shut. There came a time when I chose to leave rather than be expelled. I was barely 17. When we made our escape, I was 19. The apprenticeship was over by then.

UEZ: Yet your training was rather unusual. What did the photographer at Sans Souci regard as good photography?

HB: what is regarded today as good 19th-century photography: clear, clean images--with a complete tonal range, with appropriate depths--devoted to the subject.

UEZ: But you're describing the photography of the 20th century. In the 19th century there was a preference for soft lines, vedutas ...

HB: There were two strains in 19th-century photography, and this was the strain of direct, descriptive photography. The portraits were not at all unlike the portraits of August Sander. Sander is also--for me--a 19th-century photographer, a bit oriented toward painting. These people knew exactly how to show a hand, how to incorporate it into the picture, the shoulders slightly turned, the farther side of the face receiving the most light, the hair lit from behind.

UEZ: When you met, had you, Mr. Becher, already been photographing industrial buildings?

BB: Yes, the first photos were produced in 1957, when we had not yet met, with a small-format camera, not for the sake of the photos themselves, but to draw from them, and paint. There was an industrial plant that was being demolished in Siegen. I sat there for weeks and drew, but couldn't keep up with the speed of the demolition. In order to complete the drawings later on--for the etchings, lithographs and paintings that would come out of them--I photographed the plant. But before that, I had already started saving photographs of industrial plants, taken by the owners. There was the Brachbach works and the Grunebach works, and, in Siegen, the Hainer works--all of them producing steel. When the plants were altered--modernized--or shut down, when the offices were closed, the owners didn't want the photos anymore. They wanted to get rid of the image of the 19th century. But I thought the big contact prints, that showed the plants exactly, were just great. I was glad to have them.

The plants were not big then. So that when you had the blast furnace, or two furnaces, you could get them into the picture without cutting anything out. The huge plants, Krupp and so on, came later.

UEZ: You, Mrs. Becher, escaped from a state that celebrated the worker and then met Bernhard Becher here in Dusseldorf. And he had this strange interest in industrial plants. Coming from Sans Souci, from the photography of the 19th century, didn't you find his interest rather odd?

HB: No, I also felt attracted to these plants, only I didn't know why. When I came to the Ruhr for the first time, I was most surprised. I had already been interested in the world of the railways. After we had flown out of Berlin, I was always hanging around Hamburg harbor. I still didn't have any idea how to present it; I just snapped away, with a Rolleiflex. I tried to capture this no-man's-land, where there's nothing, but it didn't work without objects. Somehow you always end up with an object--a crane, for example. The whole project still lacked a form, and if it had any, I was perhaps a bit influenced by Albert Renger-Patzsch. There was still very little material that I could have imitated.

UEZ: When did your photography take on a form? Was the discovery of this form already a part of your collaboration with Mr. Becher?

HB: The collaboration arose only from the interest that could be shared; that was what appealed to me.

UEZ: Did that mean becoming tied up in industrial history, in the history of specific plants, at that time?

BB: There couldn't be any talk of that then. My development has taken a somewhat different path. My first intentions were to photograph the objects--the non-architectural industrial structures--and then to cut the pictures out, to paste them together as montages, as collages. To avoid overlaps, I photographed from a ladder. Then from the prints I would cut out the wall of a house in order to end up with 20 house walls, which I assembled in a collage. While photographing, I noticed that if one stands up high, the object one is photographing becomes integrated into the background, which opens out. Then we saw that if the photographs are placed side by side, they begin to relate. You can very well perceive things that differ little from each other as individual elements, if you assemble them in groups. The workers' houses or the winding towers (for hoisting) look very similar, and you could think that they came from a production series, like cars. Only when you put them beside each other do you see their individuality. When you approach the theme of industry and everything that goes with it in this manner, you make discoveries. Anyway, it so happened that these plants were torn down. Particularly in the Siegerland, from about 1950 on, the foundries began closing. Then one mine after another closed. I felt the need--I don't want to say the duty--to document these things.



UEZ: You were born in Siegen. Did you grow up in this industrial landscape?

BB: I was born and grew up in this industrial landscape. In Siegen, practically in the middle of the town, we had a small blast furnace. That's completely unimaginable today. All the grime spread through the old town center. I could see, hear and smell the smelter from our window. Like the Martins Church or the Nicholai Church, there was the Hainer steelworks. It was a district within the town.

UEZ: When you started to photograph seriously in the Siegerland, what did you call what you were doing? Did you call it a documentation, or did you think you were writing a part of industrial history? Or did you see it as art?

BB: I thought then that what Tinguely was doing was an arts-and-craft interpretation of industry. I didn't agree with that approach, but today I see it differently. At least I see today that Tinguely brought together a wonderful collection of junk, of things that don't exist anymore. And I find the early things very good. But I thought that a certain foundry, a certain mine was much more interesting, just for its own sake. In the first place, such structures are monumental and rich in detail. They have an element of the irrational--something that cannot be grasped--but they are nonetheless absolutely functional. They tell the story of the time before World War I, the steel boom. There was a great deal of overproduction; they show that.

UEZ: A piece of history that tells itself?.

BB: A Calvinist baroque. Behind industrial structures is the wish to earn money, sensibly enough. On the other hand, things are produced which are not really needed. The photographs show that.

UEZ: When you put yourself back in time and look forward, what did you think would happen in the coming decades?

BB: We thought it would be a wonderful adventure. We would travel round the world. We had already seen Belgium at that time, the Aachen coalfields and the Saarland. We traveled to northern France just to look around. We thought: if a system really does develop from our work, then we will be working with what amounts to an international industrial district in the drawer. Since these structures were disappearing more and more, we could imagine that conserving these things photographically would someday be of general interest. And it can't fail to happen. We never shared that romantic idea that we could have survived without industry, or could survive without it in the future. On the other hand, we didn't see industry as exclusively positive. We already saw the peculiar element, overproduction, the whole range of inherent difficulties. But we also saw that the people who were directly involved--those in the Ruhr, in Liege, in Charleroi--are a whole separate subculture, individuals who experience industry as their lives, or, let's say, as their world. Besides, I knew this from the Siegerland. All my ancestors on both my father's and mother's sides were employed in the mining and steel industries. I knew the conditions, the vocabulary. For me, it was a real extension of childhood--looking for places that are similar to what I grew up with.

UEZ: And when did you actually begin to exhibit photographs?

BB: The first exhibition was in 1963 in the Nohl Gallery in Siegen.

HB: That was a bookstore.

BB: But a progressive gallery, also. In those days they exhibited Karl Otto Gotz, Peter Bruning, Winfred Gaul, Reinhold Kohler--a lot of Informel painting.

UEZ: So you made it into the category of art with your first exhibition?

BB: There was no other possibility. You have to imagine: even museums or institutes that exhibited photos wouldn't have exhibited us.

UEZ: Why not?

HB: Completely inartistic!

BB: They said, "You've photographed walls of houses!" There's no interpretation of our environment, no artistic interpretation of industry. If you look at the photos of Otto Steinert, how he photographed industry, that was a highly dramatic rendition, influenced by abstract art, by Surrealism. To say, "This winding tower is an object, and it is just as interesting on its own terms"--that was not possible. People like Reinhold Kohler in Siegen or the bookseller Nohl saw that it was interesting. We hadn't had an exhibition in Dusseldorf at that stage, although we lived there.

UEZ: Your first book was Anonymous Sculptures.

BB: Yes, but much later, not until 1970. The first catalogue was earlier, in the spring of 1967.

UEZ: Was there a time when you said to yourself that the book is perhaps the better medium? Doing photography for books?

BB: That's more likely to occur to someone today, now that reproduction technology is so good. When you stand in front of an original print, though, you can walk around in it. In terms of precision and of the range of shades, it is in a class by itself. And then the possibility of placing pictures together: this was how we arrived at our first typology. You can step right back, three, four, five meters, and you then have the whole thing, or you can go right up close and see every screw. That was the argument for the original photograph. A book was something else. There you have the whole topic in a limited form--leaf through it and put it down.

UEZ: How did you come to the idea of the typology?

BB: At Nohl's we used white-painted wooden frames, in which both vertical and horizontal formats could be shown. The frames were hung in two rows, one under the other in front of the bookshelves. This uniformity of presentation both established a type and drew attention to the small differences among examples of the type.

HB: The pressure that drove our work then was the first coal crisis, in the `60s, then the first steel crisis. We knew precisely ...

BB: ... that if we didn't photograph these structures right then, they would be lost. Even if we didn't like a particular one ...

UEZ: Didn't like it?

BB: If it was a building that had no aura, if it appeared boring. Then we photographed it nonetheless. Often the results were a surprise, particularly with wide-angle shots. If we had to stand close to a given structure to photograph it, only the wide angle could take it in, and only in the picture is it wholly visible. You can only judge an object as a whole when you have the necessary distance. Experience showed that the wide-angle shot should be taken from a height half that of the object, so that a normal view can be achieved again.



UEZ: You then made two books for Prestel Publisherss: The Architecture of Winding and Water Towers and Zollern 2. At that time, in the `70s, you seem to have been enlisted by the industrial historians.

HB: That's how it was, too!

BB: They wanted to write a text, and garnish their text with our photos.

HB: They couldn't imagine that photographs could stand on their own. They wanted to give it a scientific basis.

UEZ: Did you ever consider that the easier path might have been to ally yourselves with the historians?

BB: On the contrary, it was quite dreadful.

HB: It was a bad experience. Working with them, we felt for the first time that we weren't free. We got a stipend, then, and delivered the work. Then, all at once, a flurry of requests, ideas, conditions. One had to become expert in technical history.

UEZ: Did the publications help you, or did they do you harm?

BB: We made the best of it: we did the book layout, chose the sequence, wrote a small text ourselves.

UEZ: But you didn't end up employing your typographical knowledge in order to earn money, as you had planned in your time at the academy.

BB: Oh yes, I developed a couple of company logos and accepted a couple of graphic commissions.

UEZ: You developed logos?

BB: Yes. Well, not the Mercedes star. And Hilla had great commissions.

HB: And even some very adventurous ones. In those days there were world expositions all over. It was the time when Germans started to look outward again. There was an architecture firm, Lippsmeier, and I worked for 15 years with them. Then came the German pavilions at world fairs--in New York, in Chicago, in Buenos Aires, in Helsinki. I often went along, helped with the setting up and documented it afterward. I was in the Sudan for a while, then in Senegal. I collected ideas for interior designs: material, photos and drawings, by other people, too. Whatever fitted the topic: world exhibitions of medicine ...

BB: The toy exhibition was very beautiful.

HB: In Chicago. For that I did research in the museum in Nuremberg. One could earn quite a lot of money. The Buenos Aires exhibition paid for our next car, and also the costs and the trips. It was short-term, intensive work, which financed the rest of the year.

UEZ: It's not something that initially springs to mind, but it is a fact that the start of your work together coincides with the beginnings of English and American Pop art. Do you remember seeing the first things by Warhol? I mention Warhol because of the seriality.

HB: Before Warhol, we saw Lichtenstein, in Alfred Schmela's gallery. But you're asking about the serial element. The serial element for us resulted from our having collected so much material on certain topics. But 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. It became more and more clear to us that there are definite varieties, species and subspecies of the structures we were photographing. That is, in effect, an old-fashioned approach. Later it was also used in Conceptual art, logically enough.

UEZ: Who are you thinking of?

HB: Joseph Kosuth. Gilbert and George. Hanne Darboven.

UEZ: When was your system, your working process, fully in place?

BB: When we decided on the typologies in sets of nine. Previously we had had the photos in square frames, so we could put in square-, vertical- or horizontal-format prints.

UEZ: Because the square frames neutralized the format.

BB: Yes, and for this reason it was possible to hang two or three rows, one above the another. At the same time, it could be observed that the families of objects became more similar.

BB: Look at these rough copies, little contact prints, glued. We finally arrived at the format ...

HB: One meter by one and a half: those were the largest sheets of cardboard you could buy, and we used them for the mounts. There was no money for frames then, not even in the museums.

UEZ: We are looking at nine cooling towers in vertical format which are stuck onto a 1-by-1.5-meter piece of card.

BB: Yes, and this was the first winding-tower typology, where we still proceeded quite unsystematically, 1961 to `65. But it was pasted up after the 1966 trip to England. There were little contact prints on one sheet.

UEZ: Where do you see the unsystematic element in this stage of your work?

BB: They are indeed all winding towers, but there are types standing side by side that are not really similar to each other. This one, for example, doesn't belong to the series.

UEZ: Because it is attached to a building.

BB: And it's a horizontal format.

UEZ: A winding tower plus building gives you a horizontal format, and the horizontal format is already part of another typology.

BB: Exactly.

HB: Look, here is a type already systematized. All winding towers have one thing in common: the form of the letter A.

UEZ: In that the vertical part of the building is on the right, and the foot goes down toward the left.

HB: The shaft and the brace. Then comes another aspect: what material are the winding towers made of? There are the wooden ones from Pennsylvania, and others are of concrete. They are, it turns out, from France and Belgium. The little ones with the "hats," with the Oriental-looking superstructures-there are none like that in the Ruhr, they are definitely French.

UEZ: Where did the concept of the typology come from? Did you borrow it, or invent it for yourselves? And when did you use the term for the first time?

BB: As the subtitle for the book Anonymous Sculptures: A Typology of Technical Constructions.

UEZ: So the more similar the constructions, the more convincing the typologies?

BB: Exactly. That was what we always strove for.

UEZ: In the Eindhoven catalogue, I even found a typological page on which you compare completely different constructions. I think there is even a power pylon in it.

BB: That was an exception.

HB: Yes, it was a present--for Carl Andre, incidentally.

UEZ: Which artists did you meet in your formative years, whom did you feel close to, and with whom--apart from Andre--did you exchange works?

BB: The two who were closest to us were Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, I would say. In terms of thinking.

HB: At that time, one was closer with artists than with exhibition people--not to mention dealers.

UEZ: Where did you meet LeWitt and Andre--in America or here?

BB: Andre was often in Dusseldorf, Richard Long, too. They were both very interested in our stuff.

HB: But the world of photographers, back then, rejected our photography totally. It was regarded as "not artistic." It was appreciated all the more by the other side--the nonphotographers.

UEZ: Didn't you feel a bit lonely with your precise pictorial esthetic in the company of the Conceptualists?

HB: We were on our own in that. But we weren't lonely. We found it completely adequate.

BB: We had to make a certain effort with respect to the equipment. Because we told ourselves that we wanted to take these objects with us, so to speak. Reduce them photographically ...

HB: Tidy craft.

BB: ... so that the details could be recognized. Snapshots had no meaning for us.

HB: That wasn't acceptable.

BB: For this reason we weren't satisfied with the 2 1/2-by-3 1/2-inch negatives and changed to 5-by-7.

UEZ: Do you think that the people who pushed Minimalism and Conceptual art at the time even saw your photographic effort?

HB: Whether or not they saw the effort, I don't know. But in any case they saw that it was right, that the work was how it had to be.

BB: There was also criticism. People said that it was completely pointless to produce picture compositions. You could just as well tie the camera to your leg, and click the shutter every now and again.

UEZ: This sort of standardized view of a functional photography seems to be a common denominator among artists.

BB: That's how it was then. People wanted to get away from composition.

UEZ: Allan Sekula or Dan Graham, for example, are actually interested in the connections between objects, but don't really give much thought to how the objects are presented photographically; on the contrary, their art is characterized by the fact that they don't take photography seriously.

HB: Even these people accepted that. Doug Huebler, for example, took a picture from the car every so many minutes; a concept. Or Ed Ruscha ...

BB: He was already more precise.

HB: He became more and more precise with time. Every Building on Sunset Strip is pretty much shot from the hand; the gas stations were more correct technically.

BB: Especially the parking lots. Then it was essential. You can't show that sort of alignment totally askew, otherwise the specific quality of this sequence of lines painted on asphalt is completely lost.

UEZ: It's true, the parking lots were shot with the help of a professional photographer, from a helicopter.

HB: I believe that for many artists, photography was an aid, but shooting from the hand was not the principle. They didn't make an esthetic out of it.

UEZ: when your work first started to appear and was classified as Conceptual art, did you have a secure visual language which you knew would be viable over time? Or could you have arrived at completely different forms of presentation, or made your photographs the basis for videos?

BB: We did make a film once, on the Hannover mine.

HB: Actually, there's no need at all to talk about failures.

BB: Because that was such an enormous complex. We made a film about it because we wanted to show the atmosphere. Then we looked at the shots, still uncut, and were totally disappointed.

UEZ: How did you make the film?

HB: We borrowed a 16mm camera from Sigmar Polke. The advisor was Gary Schumm, in part, who has made a load of beautiful artist films, with Gilbert and George, for example. The idea was that this colliery was not a tightly knit conglomerate, as is usually the case, but rather a diffuse structure held together by belts, by roads.

BB: The atmospheric element was important. On top of that, we were in a hurry. We thought that if we photographed our way through the whole plant, it would take years. Then we made the film in two or three days.

HB: The thought was to drive through this very extensive industrial estate, to show the connections among preparation plant, winding tower, power plant and cokery. But as it turned out, there was so little movement there that the only movement in the film was provided by the camera.

UEZ: Because the colliery was already shut down?

HB: No. Strictly speaking, if you look at a mine like this, the only thing that moves is the wheel of the winding tower. I was thinking at the time of the early Charlie Chaplin films, where the camera sits on the tripod and everything else moves in front of it. Or Hitchcock's film Rope, which takes place in one room.

UEZ: How strange that you give us these examples, as in fact you didn't let the camera stay still.

HB: But panning the camera, up and down, right and left--that was no good.

UEZ: When did this experiment take place?

BB: 1973-74.

UEZ: Did you destroy the film in the end?

BB: No.

UEZ: We're talking about a black-and-white film?

BB: No, it was in color.

UEZ: If one is looking for the origins of your pictorial esthetic, people point most commonly to Karl Blossfeldt and to Renger-Patzsch. But you yourselves have always pointed to industrial photographs--often anonymous photographs.

BB: There are enormous archives, like the Krupp Archive, the archive of the Gutehoffnung [Good Hope] Foundry, which we looked at. We thought, all right, that exists, and what exists we don't have to do again. We do what hasn't already been done.

UEZ: If you got a tip-off now about a certain industry in Korea, would you get in a plane and photograph there?

HB: I would!

BB: Why should that be any different? Hilla was in Siberia, looked it over. There weren't any variations there that would contribute a great deal to the whole, let's say, on the subject of blast furnaces. We already have enough of them.

We are currently engaged in going through our archive. We can't afford to travel about so much these days, otherwise we would never be finished with what we've done. It's not a case of photographing everything in the world, but of proving that there is a form of architecture that consists in essence of apparatus, that has nothing to do with design, and nothing to do with architecture either. They are engineering constructions with their own esthetic. You need a certain number of forms to prove that, but at some point, you have got enough together. We are still photographing grain elevators, because there are new types of those, and we still don't have enough of the older ones. We are also still missing some types of refineries and chemical plants. We're not finished with lime kilns either.

HB: The question can also be answered by restricting oneself--if one must restrict oneself--primarily to the early industrialized countries, so that the whole historical span can be seen. Certain things are found in England, because that goes back the furthest, and in Belgium, France and Germany, up to a certain point even Italy.

BB: And the USA.

HB: Of course, there especially one finds things that are highly interesting--for example, the grain elevators. You can't do without them. But you don't necessarily have to have the grain elevators in Korea.

UEZ: Can't do without them--for what purpose?

HB: To show the breadth of variation.

UEZ: If one takes on grain elevators, you must have the American ones.

BB: The Americans built the first grain elevators as large containers, which on the inside were made up of gigantic boxes. In those days we weren't nearly as advanced in Europe, because the grain was delivered in sacks, pulled up from one floor to the next and stacked. The Americans had so much that it wasn't worthwhile putting it in sacks at all. They built enormous wooden boxes, which were then roofed over. That was the beginning of grain elevators. There are small ones and big ones, mostly in the harbor districts--an amazing range even of 19th-century buildings.

UEZ: With grain elevators you touch on the connection between architecture and its propaganda. For Le Corbusier ...

BB: ... who took them as an example ...

UEZ: ... and, as is well known, retouched them ...

BB: ... spotted out the ornamentation of the buildings ...

UEZ: ... to prove how simple this architecture is.

BB: The engineer as the noble savage.

UEZ: If you now set yourselves to photographing grain elevators in America, do you have to think of Le Corbusier, or can you distance yourselves from the propaganda aspect of the early moderns?

BB: We tried to find the grain elevators that Le Corbusier had looked at, but they were no longer there. He had some especially good examples, which in fact he appropriated from catalogues. You know the book by Reyner Banham, who demonstrated where they came from?

HB: But it was not Le Corbusier who brought to Europe the pictures of the American grain elevators.

UEZ: It was Erich Mendelssohn.

BB: He also did his own photography. The elevators that Mendelssohn photographed in Buffalo, Reyner Banham discusses in A Concrete Atlantis [MIT, 1986].

UEZ: Architects have presented industrial buildings to prove that functional building is modern building. But they don't want to accept that most of the industrial buildings were realized by anonymous master builders ...

BB: They want to do it themselves.

HB: And this transposition, taking ideas from functional buildings and using them to create a new architecture, was catastrophic.

BB: People become concrete goods, hoisted up in prefabricated buildings and then distributed!

UEZ: You would argue the other way round, speaking of the functions which these buildings really represent.

BB: We say: this is an architecture of the engineer, and it exists here and there. The grain elevators are in large part as they were originally conceived--additions are rare. Whereas a steel plant is being constantly altered; it's a conglomerate, like a medieval town that is constantly built onto. The basic structure might originate from the turn of the century, and it is then varied a number of times.

UEZ: I believe that many people who look at your pictures pick out their favorites. Do you also actually have favorite building types?

HB: The blast furnaces.

BB: In England I was quite besotted with the preparation plants, much more than with the winding towers. The preparation plant had the steel framework, from which you could recognize the construction, and then the filling in with brick.

HB: I believe that you leaned toward the form of the house, at least in the beginning, and that I was more interested in steel constructions, which are completely beyond the realm of architecture.

UEZ: What is the fundamental system when you start a project? How did you research water towers in America, for example? Did you just drive around until one turned up?

BB: There's nothing else to do. They are all over the place. But in France the water towers are shown on the Michelin maps--for cyclists, probably.

UEZ: Is the shape shown as well?

HB: No, just that it's a water tower. When you find them, it turns out, a lot of them cannot be photographed-uninteresting, built in, or you don't have enough distance.

BB: With the grain elevators, we finally made the connection that where a road and a railroad line crossed, you will find one. If not, it has been pulled down.

HB: In America we had railroad maps. And we got very precise descriptions of elevators even 100 miles away, when we asked.

UEZ: Mr. Becher, you took up your chair in Dusseldorf in 1976.

BB: And in 1996 it was over.

UEZ: Did you accept the position for financial reasons, or did you particularly want to teach?

BB: I resisted for two years. Norbert Kricke, a sculptor and then dean of the academy, had the idea of establishing a photography class. Pressure to offer one built up because of Conceptual art. There were many students who wanted to work in photography. It was evident in the painting classes, as well, that there was a gap in the curriculum. Klans Rinke, I think, and Gunther Uecker were also supportive. Hilla had already had a teaching position at the Hamburg Academy, of course. And we were already in contact with the Sonnabends in those days. I said to Kricke then, I can't combine teaching with my work, because this work involves travel. The discussion went back and forth for nearly two years.

UEZ: Why was the offer made to Bernd Becher and not to you, for example, Mrs. Becher?

HB/BB: [Laughs.]

HB: Bernd had always said, "Teaching? No way!" When Kricke rang the first time, I answered the phone. He explained the situation, and I said, "Yes, I'll do it." And he said, "No, no, no! We want the master!"

BB: He was very open about it.

HB: What should I have done, become angry? He was right in any case, that only one should do it. It would never have worked with the two of us together.

UEZ: Why not?

BB: It's not good from the teaching point of view. The course needs to go under one name. Although in fact the students were often here. We did a lot together.

UEZ: Didn't that lead to job sharing? Because you, Mrs. Becher, ended up doing a large part of the darkroom work.

HB: Of course, at that time we had to provide material for enormous exhibitions.

UEZ: Mrs. Becher, you had the teaching position previously at an art academy in Hamburg.

BB: That job was in both names. But I wasn't interested.

HB: So I did it.

UEZ: When was that?

HB: That was 1971-72, a time when one didn't "do" art anymore. You could still feel the effects of 1968.

UEZ: Art was reactionary.

HB: Taboo. There were very few students who wanted to show their work, and never in the presence of others. A lot sat in the canteen and no longer did anything at all, except maybe make placards or pamphlets. There was a great deal of heated discussion, particularly with reference to Marxism.

UEZ: As someone who fled East Germany, Mrs. Becher, you must have been especially allergic to that sort of thing.

HB: I was allergic, but on the other hand, I had done my homework. Who has read the whole of Das Kapital? I was not as vague as a lot of others, and highly critical, of course.

UEZ: Mr. Becher, when you finally agreed to take up teaching, what did you think you could teach students at an academy?

BB: I didn't think about it. The whole thing was actually quite risky. I always thought, two years, then another two years--until a team had been built up that held together, where one influenced the other and the topics complemented each other. We were by no means certain, at the time, whether we wanted to stay here. We intended to go to America.

UEZ: You had an apartment in New York at the time.

BB: Yes, and it was Ileana Sonnabend who supplied it. If I hadn't had good students at the beginning, I would have given up teaching.

UEZ: What would have been the reason for going to America?

BB: The interest in our work was very much stronger over there. We noticed that from the questions that people asked when we had an exhibition at Sonnabend, whereas here ...

HB: ... it always fell back into the realm of philosophy: "Why do you do that"? And: "Who gives you the right ..."

BB: Or: "What concern of ours is the Ruhr?"

HB: It always fell back into stereotypes again. One couldn't answer this sort of question. Our pictures are not made for philosophical interpretation. Simply to show visual material, to present and arrange it in a particular way, that wasn't sufficient in Germany. The question arose time and again: "Why do it at all?" The Americans and the English have a completely different approach to our work.

UEZ: Contrary to plan, you established yourself as a teacher at the academy and even went on teaching beyond your retirement.

BB: It was a commitment to the students. I was friends with many of them. I knew the people at the academy, so it was easy to continue for a while. Although I am now aware that it cost a lot of time. Now the daily phone calls have gone, the responsibility.

UEZ: When you stopped teaching, there was a rumor that the photography class would not be continued. Is there--to a certain extent, natural--enmity between expressionist-style painters and other teachers?

BB: You'll have to find out about that, Mr. Ziegler!

BB/HB: [Laughter.]

UEZ: Let's go back to your first preferences. Is it so that you cannot get very much out of painting?

BB: No, it's the other way around. Painting interests me more than photography.

HB: The love was quite unrequited.

UEZ: You held a crucial position. Until then, there had been no photography classes in German art academies. The technical universities offered practical training. Otto Steinert, the teacher at the Folkwang School in Essen, didn't come from a practical background in photography, but his intention was to teach photography for advertising and journalism.

HB: One couldn't imagine anything else at the time.

UEZ: In the academy did you arrive at the point where the pure and the applied were not really separate, when people wanted to learn something too practical from you?

HB: I quite consciously didn't take those students. I took people like Thomas Struth, for example; I thought Streets was great. I might have done something like that myself, but since he did it, I didn't need to. That's a sort of job sharing. Or Candida Hofer, with her interiors; she can work for years on those. If someone works at something for a really long time, then something comes out of it. The artist becomes free through the work process itself, the daily routine.

UEZ: Did you give no assignments at all?

BB: In between projects, for people who were stalled. But that never worked. Either they are obsessed and it works, or it's better just to leave it.

UEZ: What was your subject called? Not industrial photography surely? And not artistic photography.

BB: It was the Becher photography class. I consciously didn't take people who had involved themselves with industrial photography, because I didn't want them to be influenced. With the exception of Claudia Farenkemper, who photographed excavators, the big coal excavators here in the Rhine area.

UEZ: When students came to you, did that mean that they had no pressing interest in the human image?

BB: No. In Candida Hofer's case, for example, she had been photographing Turkish families. When she finished working with slides and moved on to the print, she more or less decided to use rooms as her subject matter. But that developed out of her work on the families.

UEZ: As to the question of color versus black and white, was that ever an ideological question in the Becher class?

BB: It was obvious that color had to come. We had acquired a small series in color by Stephen Shore--bought or exchanged--and the photographs hung here, for all our visitors to see. That had a certain influence.

HB: The students were basically well informed. I wouldn't restrict the influence to Stephen Shore.

BB: Even so, Stephen Shore, as one of the first, did large-format color pictures quite pictorially.

HB: There was a whole bunch of American photographers who worked with precision and professionalism. The view camera is actually a great American tradition.

UEZ: If you consider today your pupils Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky, you can see that the notion of the photographic series didn't play a big role for either. A single work can be simply taken out of Ruffs groups of work; it can stand alone. Gursky's case I find even more astonishing. Although he has a pictorial esthetic, the pictures are completely isolated by their size alone. It often happens that two pictures side by side are weaker than just one.

BB: Right. I saw that in the Dusseldorf exhibition ["Andreas Gursky: Photographs from 1984 to Today" at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, 1998]. When they are too close together, it doesn't work at all.

UEZ: That's amazing, when you consider that you worked through seriality as an experimental arrangement, until even the reading sequence--left to right, top to bottom--is lost in the tableau, then your pupils come up with the opposite.

BB: That has to do with the object of the photographer's observation. There aren't many objects that allow a serial approach.

UEZ: Didn't you try to pass on a pictorial esthetic?

BB: No. That derives from the object itself, if someone is seriously interested in it.

HB: Unless the subject is stillborn, which can also happen. If someone comes and says, I want to concern myself with cornflakes, or with telephone booths. With cars and with dog kennels.

UEZ: Why don't telephone booths work?

BB: They are all the same. The only variety is in the situation.

HB: It's not multilayered enough as subject matter. There are stillborn topics, where it's apparent that the subject won't lead very far, because it's not historically founded or is not anchored in the present or has been previously done. Think of the Cindy Sherman syndrome.

BB: That almost led me to give up, when all the girls played at being Cindy Sherman.

UEZ: But is that so unproductive--the studio travesty, the role-play? Or couldn't they do it well enough?

BB: You can't do it better than Cindy Sherman does it.

HB: Photographing yourself can also result from a certain laziness: because then you can stay at home.

UEZ: It's interesting that for any number of your pupils the topic of Germany itself comes into play.

BB: That started with Struth. He took on streets in Dusseldorf that were completely unattractive. Then he brought in the building facades, which had either been altered after the war--the ornamentation chipped off--or had been built since. Pure, simple facades, which in the reduction produce something like a collage. That created a completely new effect. From the start, Struth put himself in the center, and then the streets were like an envelope.

HB: A triangle of sky, a triangle of ground.

BB: And then he notices on the left-hand side of the street a certain characteristic, and so he places himself a little to the right, so that the left side is favored. And then his discovery that where there's a T junction, one looks at the facade, seen absolutely frontal for once, and two other rows of houses run toward it. He realized that he had struck a gold mine--the possibility of esthetically reprocessing this postwar Germany.

UEZ: You are both war children, and parts of your childhood took place during the period of National Socialist rule. To what extent has the issue of war guilt, the political control of industries, concerned you?

BB: We've often talked about it, of course. But we've taken on industrial sectors in which no specific object was produced; coal and steel can be used to manufacture anything, tanks or tin toys. For me, though, the choice of subject matter was more personal. Right next to my grandparents' house, in which I grew up, there stood a blast furnace. I could hear it, see it and smell it every day.

UEZ: Can you separate this memory from that of the Third Reich?

BB: I once spoke about that with Jeff Wall, when we were looking at an exhibition of picture books about the Nazi period. He said that there was nothing special about the picture books apart from the flags, which can be seen in almost every shot. Also, there was the permanent artificial euphoria of the marches, all those men in uniform. I certainly saw the suburban houses with steep gables as unpleasant Nazi architecture, even as a child, although I couldn't put it into context. In Siegen in the `30s, there were also barracks built in this style. But I have always thought that the industrial world is completely divorced from this. It has absolutely nothing to do with ideology. It corresponds more to the pragmatic English way of thinking.

HB: It would be impossible anyway to process something that one viewed entirely negatively. Someone who concerns himself with scorpions must love them to a certain extent. And photography is there precisely to portray what is, not to sort and reproduce only the good and the beautiful. A war photographer doesn't take his pictures because he loves war. Nonetheless, one has one's thoughts, and we don't see industry as a solely positive force. Industry has its crises and excesses, its warmongering characteristics. We have always tried to take a neutral stance in its presentation, and not to engage in glorification.

UEZ: Would it be right then to infer that, with your systematization, you have looked for a standpoint free of ideology?.

HB: Yes, because the work wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

UEZ: You have almost become cultural ambassadors, who travel from country to country and compare industrial buildings. Although you see specific national traits, you don't make judgments.

HB: It's not the Olympics!

BB: Of course, we have our preferences. If you commissioned an industrial historian or someone from the field of industrial archeology, he would see things quite differently. We have favored the pragmatic buildings.

UEZ: Everything that's overloaded, monumental, the castle and palace romanticism of heavy industry, the Art Nouveau buildings, everything that creates particular forms, you have avoided?

BB: We've avoided that. Because we said to ourselves: the soul of industrial thought is shown in the opposite of that.

UEZ: It's remarkable that the Americans have a word for this--the vernacular--and we don't.

HB: It can't even be described in German!

UEZ: Do you see an elemental connection of photography to the vernacular?

HB: Yes, a fundamental one. For me, photography is by its very nature free of ideology. Photography with ideology falls to pieces.

--translated by Michael Herd

Author: Ulf Erdmann Ziegler is a Frankfurt-based writer and critic. He curated "The World as One: Photography from Germany after 1989," an exhibition currently touring Asia.




ASX CHANNEL: Bernd and Hilla Becher

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