It’s probably worth making a quick nod to the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher given, not just their significant influence on contemporary German photography, but also their method of working.

From the beginning, the Bechers worked systematically at their task. They undertook countless journeys in their Volkswagen van, which also served as a bedroom, improvised darkroom, and mobile nursery for their son, Max, who was born in 1964. The routes they staked out in their Düsseldorf studio took them to the far corners of western Europe and north America, through Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Luxembourg. In 1966, they undertook a six-month journey through England and south Wales, taking hundreds of photographs of the coal industry around Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham and the Rhondda Valley.

Pitheads, 1974 © The Bechers. All taken at collieries in Britain. From the Tate Collection.

Bernd Becher was born August 20, 1931, in Siegen, Germany. He studied painting and lithography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Stuttgart from 1953 to 1956 and studied typography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1957 to 1961. Hilla Becher was born Hilla Wobeser on September 2, 1934, in Potsdam, Germany. She studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she met Bernd Becher. The two artists first collaborated in 1959 and were married in 1961. They began working as freelance photographers, concentrating on industrial photography.

From their first series of photographs of water towers, the artists have not veered from architectural portraiture subjects, using both industrial and domestic structures such as gas tanks, silos, framework houses, and the like. They were given their first gallery show in 1963 at the Galerie Ruth Nohl in Siegen and by 1968 were exhibiting in the United States as well as in European cities outside Germany.

You can see a portfolio of their images here.

Bernd Becher died in 2007, and you can read an obituary on The Guardian here.

And, of course, you can read an interview with Hilla Becher entitled ‘Of course we were freaks’ by Tobias Haberl and Dominik Wichmann on the Joerg’s Conscientious blog here.

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