Biography of 19th century photographers

PHOTOGRAPHIC GLOSSARY
For a brief explanation of technical
and historical terms, please see:
Art Photography Glossary.

Bernd and Hilla Becher's Photography

Two of the greatest photographers of the Dusseldorf School, Bernhard and Hilla Becher have - since the 1960s - compiled an extensive series of photos of industrial architecture, capturing the residues of a fading industrial age.

This artistic couple worked together for more than thirty years on this pictorial study, creating an astounding archive of documentary photography, far from academic discourse. It features: workers' housing, water towers and gas tanks, lime kilns and blast furnaces, coal bunkers and cooling towers.

The instruments of industrial production, seen as sculpture, seem isolated, without working people, monuments to themselves and, equally, symbols of a society organized for functionality and efficiency. As the founders of the Becher school of fine art ph