Identify what you consider to be the legacy of the artist Bernd and Hilla Becher for the importance of the photographic image.
‘The modern photographer is the architect’s greatest publicist’; that is, if one considers architectural photography a dumb copying device, and a pure record that informs the onlooker only of the building and its functionality. However banal a series of photographs depicting only water towers may seem, Bernd and Hilla Becher dedicated much attention to photographing such icons of post-war Germany and so created a historical document. In this way, the Bechers’ living legacy is ‘a narrative of socio-historic reality based on photography’s potential to retain some indexical trace of its subject’, but as mentioned by Mack, the Bechers are amongst those photographers who are also ‘involved in some level of construction or fabrication, distinct from the realist and objective position which is usually attributed to [photography]’. Their photography and teachings represent a time when photography was winning serious consideration by the European art scene and so are undeniably important and influential, but perhaps the most pointed question to ask of their work is the exact nature of its influence on other artists, on the nature of the photographic image, and on the landscape of Germany of which the mine shafts and silos they photographed were a vital part.
Just as an historic text is the subject of the author’s interpretation of the reality of the times, a photograph is the product of the photographer’s choice and manipulation of an image. It is plain that the Bechers were not attempting to flatter architects or approve of the design and function of the buildings they photographed, as is often the case in the classic understanding of architectural photography. Although it cannot be denied that their many images, like those of August Sander, create a social document for posterity’s sake, the photographs are in no way a sentimental harking back to the past or a reassurance of German identity. The technology depicted in the Bechers’ typological sequences, often in a state of deterioration or abandonment, could be said to represent a time of spiritual poverty and the ‘erosion of inherited cultural and moral values’. In light of this suggestion, Bernd and Hilla Becher seemed to be seeking to document their subjects in a clinical, objective manner; remaining fascinated with but shedding the past in the hope that ‘the unburied industrial sources of Modernist imagery be sanitized and distanced from us, lest [they]… invade the minds of another generation’. Therefore,
unlike August Sander, the Bechers are more interested in showing us death (rather than Sander's life study of the classes of Germany); the photographs can be said to be looking ahead to a better future only if the viewer interprets it so.
Shouldn't these photos then, fascinated by death to the point of necrophilia, be filed away and forgotten? Rather, it should be said that the photos enlarge our understanding of the photographic image, precisely because they serve as a stark reminder of a past away from which the world has moved. As much as it was tactful for German artists to deny history in the immediate post-war period, Bernd and Hilla Becher chose to show it, with characteristically functionalist honesty and truth. Viewing the photographs, we know that the spiritually repressive time to which the buildings belong has passed and so view our position favourably. Photography is the art form that is most closely comparable to our reality; whether they meant to or not, the Bechers have created art through which we view history with a clarity that cannot be gained through memory or other art forms.
Photography has always been associated with some notion of cutting out and keeping the past in order that it is not forgotten, although not necessarily in order to commend or legitimate the events therein. An extensive collection of nakedly truthful architectural portraits such as the Bechers’, could be said to be a way of preserving the buildings and what they represent, rather than a way of banishing them to ‘the registers of the dead’ in order that society moves forward (or at least
away from the faux 'progression' of industrialisation). Preservation, yes, and as important to the renewal of German identity as is the conservation of Auschwitz. Indeed, the Bechers were heavily involved in the German industrial preservation movement that started in the 1950s and resulted in numerous icons of the country’s economic and cultural history being listed and their demolition prevented. The power of the Bechers' art, and therefore part of their rendering of photography as an important form, is tangible in that the photographs were so compelling that they became a part of a movement which changed (or maintained) Germany’s landscape.
It can also be said that, in preserving the winding gear, the framework workers’ houses and silos in their art, the Bechers’ ‘industrial archaeology’ was an investigation into specific communities. Despite claims that their subjects are completely isolated from their environment, the photographs are often dated and their locations documented, and therefore offer a pertinent reminder of a specific space and time for each similar but significantly different image. From there, a viewer can take time to study the stilled physicality of the buildings, their silent watch, whilst remaining aware of their specialised existence within individual societies.
