Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher - Photographers of German Industrial Landscapes

Bernhard and Hilla Becher born 1931 and 1934

German artist-photographers preoccupied with the photography of old industrial buildings in a manner related to industrial archaeology. Bernhard Becher was born on August 20,1993 in the coal-mining town of Siegen and studied graphic art and lettering at the Stuttgart and Düsseldorf Academies. Began making paintings and lithographs of industrial structures such as iron-ore preparation plants and railway stations in 1953, influenced partly by de Chirico. Gradually became more interested in the buildings themselves than in the act of painting, began to collect old photographs of them and from 1956 to photograph them himself. Gave up painting altogether 1957. Hilla Becher, born in Berlin [1934], had studied photography in Potsdam and had worked as a photographer in advertising at the time they met. She had decided to give up advertising and start again, and had begun to study at Düsseldorf Academy, where she also taught in the photographic department. They met in 1959 and decided to work together on the industrial landscape that became their life work. Began in the same year to make systematic series, at first mostly of buildings in the German Ruhr and Holland; from 1965 also in Great Britain, France, Belgium, the USA etc. First one-man exhibition at the Galerie Ruth Nohl, Siegen, 1963. 
 In 2004, the Bechers received a Hasselblad Award, one of the highest international honors in photography. The award citation called the couple “among the most influential artists of our time,” noting that “their systematic photography of functionalist architecture, often organizing their pictures in grids, brought them recognition as conceptual artists as well as photographers.”
 Bernd Becher, known with his wife, Hilla, for photographing relics of industry in the changing urban landscapes of late-20th-century Europe and the United States, died in Rostock, Germany. He was 75.

 

Husband and wife team Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing old industrial sites in the 1950s, and described their subjects as ‘buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style’. The coal bunkers in these photographs were located in Germany, France and Britain, while the photographs of pitheads were all taken at British collieries between 1965 and 1973. Within a few years of completing this work, almost all of the structures had been demolished.

 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bernd-becher-and-hilla-becher-718/text-artist-biography
 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/arts/26becher.html?_r=0