Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher are best known for their austere, elegiac, and widely influential photographs of industrial architecture in their native Germany. The Bechers captured what they called the “anonymous sculpture” of water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine tipples, and framework houses in striking black-and-white compositions, which they almost always arranged in gridlike series they referred to as “typologies.” These typologies act as catalogs of industrial design, historic documents of obsolete technologies, and expansions on the possibilities of landscape photography. The Bechers have been the subject of exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Modern Art. They won the Erasmus Prize and the Hasselblad Award, and their work has sold for six figures on the secondary market.