Between Preservation and Destruction: Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Archive of “Anonymous Sculpture”

Summary

THIS ESSAY EXAMINES the archival practices of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, focusing on their first decade working together beginning in 1959, during which they produced the earliest iterations of and statements about their ongoing project photographing the industrial structures they termed “anonymous sculpture.” It considers what they meant to achieve in this production by systematically documenting these edifices—pit heads, cooling towers, blast furnaces, water towers, and others used in resource extraction and processing—of the Siegerland and Ruhr regions of central and western Germany. The Bechers keenly sensed that the industries of which these structures were emblems were in the beginning stages of a process of decline and obsolescence when they made their first collaborative works. These areas of coal and iron mining and steel production were the industrial heartland of Germany from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period and began undergoing structural changes at this time, manifesting the initial effects of the deindustrialization and globalization that would come to a head in the 1970s. By the end of their first decade of partnership, their archive amounted to around 2,500 photographs made using now famously standardized techniques and formats: these included black-and-white photography in diffused light, a striving for precise detail and legibility enabled by large format cameras, frontal and centered views that required access to particular vantage points within plant complexes and sometimes the clearing away of obstructions, the fixing of single, whole objects from a middle-height, and regularized arrangements of the resulting images.

The Bechers’ was one of a number of photographic, archival projects in gridded formats undertaken by German and other European artists after the Second World War, beginning around 1960. Following Benjamin Buchloh, these can be understood as spanning two opposing poles, seen, on the one hand, in the incongruity of Gerhard Richter's “anomic” archive—characterized by its gathering of images from disparate genres and seemingly without organizing principle—and, on the other, in the Bechers’ consistent and ordered collections. Both were, in part, responses to the particular “memory crisis” of postwar Germany: their accumulative impulses located at the intersection of the widespread repression of the atrocities and destruction of the war that occurred at this time and the simultaneous explosion of photographic mass and advertising culture that accompanied the West German Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle).