Typologies of industrial buildings
Typologies of industrial buildings is a book by Bernd and Hilla Becher in which their photographic work is subsumed. Bernd and Hilla Becher met in the late 1950s at the Düsseldorf Art Academy , where they attended courses with Walter Breker . This enabled Hilla Becher to set up a photo workshop and from then on photo courses were also offered there.
Bernd and Hilla Becher began to photograph buildings at the end of the 1950s, first including half-timbered houses , then later exclusively industrial buildings that were typical of the period in which they were built and which were already threatened with demolition. She continued this work until her death, after the death of Bernd Becher Hilla Becher continued to work alone. The buildings were recorded strictly and objectively, mostly from a central perspective, people usually do not appear in the photos. Exposure was preferably carried out under a cloudy sky in order to obtain uniform light. A large format camera with a negative format of 13 × 18 cm was used as the camera in order to be able to depict as many details as possible .
The basis of the book was the exhibition Typologies of Industrial Buildings of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen , in collaboration with the Haus der Kunst Munich in the art collection in the Ständehaus Düsseldorf from November 29, 2003 to April 12, 2004, in which the couple's life's work was summed up. Most of the pictures presented in this book were published in individual works before, but it was only in the exhibition and the book that the breadth of the entire work was presented in an overview.
The total work of the Bechers is estimated at around 16,000 negatives, of which only a fraction have so far been exhibited or published in book form. For their work they were u. a. awarded the Konrad von Soest Prize of the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe, the Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography and the State Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia . Stylistically, the work of the Bechers is assigned to the new objectivity and conceptual art .
content
The formal structure of the book is comparable to that of the books on individual building types. So-called "developments" are presented, six, nine, twelve or more photographs of buildings of the same type per side in order to make similarities and differences recognizable in direct comparison. The individual chapters are:
- Preface
- Water towers
- Cooling towers
- gas tank
- Headframes
- Processing plants
- Gravel and crushed stone works
- Lime kilns
- Grain silos
- Coal bunker
- Blast furnaces
- Detail shots
- Factory halls
The Bechers traveled all over the world for the recordings, but the focus was on Germany, Great Britain, France, Belgium and the USA.
expenditure
In addition to the German edition, there is also an English translation of the book
- Typologies of industrial buildings. By Bernd and Hilla Becher et al. Schirmer / Mosel , Munich 2003, ISBN 3-8296-0092-5 .
- Typologies of Industrial Buildings , 2004. ISBN 0-262-02565-5 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Entry of the book in the German National Library , accessed on November 5, 2017.
- ^ Heinz-Norbert Jocks: Typologies of industrial buildings. Bernd and Hilla Becher. Art Collection NRW, K21, Düsseldorf, November 29, 2003– April 12, 2004 Haus der Kunst, Munich, September 9–19, 2004 . In: Kunstforum International . tape 169 , 2004, pp. 256 ( kunstforum.de [accessed November 9, 2017]).
- ^ Foreword to the book by Armin Second
- ^ Entry of the book in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), accessed on November 6, 2017.