Design
How Hilla Becher Changed the Way We See Buildings
The German artist, dead at age 81, was half of a duo that changed the pitch of architectural photography in the 1960s.
Hilla Becher, one half of the collaborative duo that changed the pitch of architectural photography in the 1960s and ‘70s, has died at the age of 81. The German photographer and her husband, Bernd Becher, who died eight years ago, launched a study of the industrial buildings of Europe and, as a result, carved out an “objective” course in photography.
Today, the Bechers’ photographs only seem objective in a technical sense. Forty years on, their sturdy black-and-white photographs of crumbling monoliths summon romantic images of an industrial revolution forged in factories. Blast furnaces, water tanks, lime kilns, and grain silos comprise the “anonymous sculptures” that the Bechers would study their entire lives.