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. Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Anna Blair. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Movements and Styles: Conceptual Art. Overview and Artworks. Important Art by Bernd and Hilla Becher.
View all Important Art. Andreas Gursky. Overview and Artworks Biography. Thomas Struth. August Sander. Sol LeWitt. Summary Concepts Artworks.
Conceptual Art. Modern Photography. New Objectivity. Cite article. Correct article. The photographs are accompanied by locations, but not by dates of construction or indications of use, and so appear mysterious to their audience. This removal of historical and geographical context in the Bechers' images is particularly striking when considered in relation to the period in which the artists were working, as Germany attempted to come to terms with the Holocaust and other aspects of recent European history.
The Bechers' work represents the past, in the form of buildings, without acknowledging or engaging with this rupture and this approach to modern history can be seen as either part of or counter to the struggle amongst German artists, most prominently Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, to come to terms with postwar identity. Thomas Struth, one of the Bechers' students, argued that their work was so extreme in its pursuit of the apolitical that the position read as a response to the recent past rather than as a neutral act, suggesting their approach reflects the difficulty of engagement; others have criticized them for prioritizing the aesthetic qualities of factories that almost certainly contributed to the German war effort.
These photographs, characterized by their lack of context, ultimately refuse to provide insight into the range of social, political, and environmental issues with which industrial sites were often associated, leaving them open to interpretation.
Bernd and Hilla Becher organized their images of tanks for storing gas according to type; this sequence shows spherical gasholders, which have the largest capacity, holding liquefied or compressed gasses.
These gas tanks were made of steel, insulated against heat and coated in reflective paint and those shown in this sequence were elevated on straight pylons, which was often, but not always, the case. The grouping of spherical gasholders together attracts the audience's attention to the staining on the outside of the structures and to the different positions of the skeletal staircases that wrap around the outside of the tanks, encouraging consideration of these as aesthetic properties that differentiate the structures from one another without interfering with their function.
The Bechers' typology, here as elsewhere, presents the industrial structures almost as scientific specimens; there is no clear hierarchy or imposition of the photographers' own conclusions regarding the gas tanks, with the audience's attention distributed equally between the twelve images. The Bechers regularly cited August Sander, who had taken this approach in representing people, plants and building types such as castles and gothic cathedrals, as an influence, and this can be seen clearly in their use of this format.
In these groups, the individual structure is subsumed into that of the larger group, making them examples of a type rather than individual specimens.
The spherical gas tanks are presented as the products of unknown engineers which do not express the individuality of their designers and the Bechers' presentation matches this, carefully avoiding any expression of the photographers' subjective responses, erasing the individual in order to focus on society more broadly. In choosing to photograph gas tanks, the Bechers position these forms as worthy of attention, grouping them for inspection in a similar manner to that in which artists and scientists had previously grouped gothic cathedrals and rare butterflies.
Other artists, later, continued this tradition, but altered it further, with a particular emphasis on the snapshot rather than exacting composition; Ed Ruscha's Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations , for example, arranges apparently unstudied shots of petrol stations in a similar manner, suggesting that it is the typology itself, rather than the content, that transforms the everyday into art.
Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Anna Blair. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Movements and Styles: Conceptual Art. Photography with ideology falls to pieces. You merely need to select the right objects and place them precisely in the picture; then they tell the story of their own accord.
To photograph things frontally creates the strongest presence and you can eliminate the possibilities of being too obviously subjective. Calling yourself an artist does not make you one, that's for others to decide. It doesn't make any sense to say: I am an artist! Calvinism rejects all forms of art and therefore never developed its own architecture. The buildings we photograph originate directly from this purely economical thinking. The photo is only a substitute for an object; it is unsuitable as a picture in its customary sense.
This is purely economic architecture. They throw it up, they use it, they misuse it, they throw it away. The photo can optically replace its object to a certain degree. This takes on special meaning if the object cannot be preserved. This is a requiem for a lost world and shows that, through the passing of time, even that which was once considered purely functional and even ugly, can attain beauty when seen through the eyes of the most attentive photographers.
Summary of Bernd and Hilla Becher Bernd and Hilla Becher spent their career documenting industrial structures across the Western world, creating a form of photography arranged by type that, through repetition, encourages viewers to engage deeply with the formal qualities of the subject matter. Accomplishments Since the s, the Bechers have focused exclusively on industrial structures that are typically overlooked.
Their photographs focus the audience's vision on buildings and machinery from which people typically look away, demanding serious consideration. Their consistent focus on presenting structures associated with the coal and steel industries leads the viewer to reconsider their aesthetic preferences and encourages ongoing interest in industrial form. Bernd and Hilla Becher's work aspires toward objective documentation, aiming for images without subjectivity.
Their photographs reacted against the prevailing mid th -century trend toward images in which the subject of a photograph is transformed by artistic elements such as soft focus, atmospheric lighting, or creative perspective. The Bechers photographed all structures in the same way, from a direct angle with a low horizon against a grey sky that minimized shadows, cropping each image so that the subject filled the frame. The Bechers' images are often associated with Conceptual art , due to the way in which they transform structures into form through removing them from their political and environmental context, even though the artists rejected this association.
In arranging and displaying the images in sequences according to type, the works emphasize the similarities and differences between the structures that are presented. In this way, the arrangement of images acts as a commentary on aesthetics. The Bechers' lack of apparent consideration of industry's role in Nazi Germany is striking and has been subject to some criticism. A number of sites that they photographed were almost certainly involved in producing machinery and weapons used by German forces in World War II, but their images give no indication of this, tightly focusing on aesthetics at the expense of historical engagement.
0コメント