Bernd and Hilla Becher was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from July 15 to November 6.
Düsseldorf School founders Bernd and Hilla Becher were finally given the retrospective they deserve: an eponymous exhibition at The Met, which closed in early November. Their famous “portraits,” which turn industrial infrastructures into objets d’art, are stunning on the level of photography, their toned blacks, grays, and whites even and soothing. But the Bechers’ photography transcends the medium. It reads not as single images, but rather in layers, almost like an architectural drawing. The photographs’ gridded arrangement on the gallery walls and in the pages of their books only emphasized this effect, vaguely recalling an architect’s iterative process. Taken as a whole, the work also hints at the larger social and economic history in the landscapes and buildings captured by the camera.
Shooting in the ’60s on black-and-white film with a cumbersome large-format camera, the Bechers didn’t edit their photos the way contemporary photographers might, making the aesthetic continuity between each frame that much more impressive. Bernd and Hilla both obsessed over the ideal shooting conditions: an orthogonal angle and a thin gray veil of overcast light that lent the final product an intentional two-dimensional quality. The near impossibility of predicting these qualities of season, sun, and time left the Bechers at their mercy and even led Bernd to request a clause in his professorial contract that would excuse him from teaching and work any day he deemed ideal for a photographic project. The University of Düsseldorf accepted his terms.
Such exacting habits were on display at The Met, where the exhibit followed a meticulously researched time line spanning six galleries filled with photographs, books, exhibition posters, drawings, collages, and studies. The chronologic organization might have felt like a dry undergraduate survey course, but the work itself cut through the strict structure. The repetition created an attractive visual rhythm, while the varied scales of the work gave the exhibit a welcome buoyancy. Moving from a black-and-white room of photographs of workers’ houses into another filled with neon poster art and tiny pocket notebook sketches generated the feeling of inhabiting the Bechers’ process organically, without pedantry.
Their creative impulses stretched back to their teenage years. Bernd made contemporary-feeling photo-collages and perspectival drawings; Hilla experimented with imaging reflective metal forms. Eventually, such instincts gave way to an interest in documenting the death masks of industry: the machinations of blast furnaces, cooling towers, and all manner of smelting machines are made legible in images that reveal how these things had once worked and offer clues as to why they were now dying.
Picking up these clues requires understanding the larger systems of production, less obvious in the portraiture than in the newly exhibited landscape-style site photographs. These rich, contextual images represent a departure from the prescription of the artists’ portraiture, and they convey a sense of immense scale at odds with a dark and encroaching wilderness just beyond the frame. These images are more than landscapes in the Romantic sense of the word—they are systems maps. The generous space of the Met gallery helped to reveal what was behind these objects in a grid: the oppressive project of for-profit industrial production, in all its sinister intricacy. In one set of images, we saw the astounding proximity of workers’ housing to chimneys and chemical chambers. Peaked roofs and plaster-lath vernacular architecture resided just below the twisted steel forms of blast furnaces, their forms all smudged with soot. Wall text alluded more concretely to the labor experiences of the time: the Bechers, especially later in their career, often conducted interviews with laborers. In the photographs of Coca-Cola conveyors at Zeche Concordia we learned, for example, that “during Word War II, when staff were conscripted, the mine depended on the forced labor of Soviet prisoners.”
My own grandfather was a steel worker in the great urban foundries that used to characterize Chicago and dozens of smaller midwestern cities in the second half of the twentieth century. (Incidentally, the show had many examples of the couple’s studies in Youngstown, Ohio.) When I was a kid, we’d drive down to the South Side, and he’d take me to work. Hard hat on, I would see the sprays of fire from the furnaces and the full force of the heat radiating from openair bays. I thought it was the coolest job anyone’s grandfather could possibly have, and I mourned with him when the foundry closed in the early aughts. Considering that time line, his place of work well outlived most of the industrial places the Bechers knew. The duo had a knack—a goal, even—of catching these industrial behemoths in their final days, when decay had begun to, but not yet succeeded in, taking over, when laborers were still observable and their stories still tellable. Their art not only captures the essence of built form; it allows us to imagine what stories might have taken place in it.