Bernd and Hilla Becher

"Bernd and Hilla Becher's lifetime project of documenting the industrial landscapes of Europe and North America has secured their position in the canon of postwar photographers." "Becher scholar Susanne Lange, granted access to the photographers' archives and quoting extensively from interviews with them, has written the first sustained analysis and biography of the Bechers' extraordinary partnership. She discusses, among other topics, both the functionalist and aesthetic dimensions of the Bechers' subject matter, their typologizing (which she finds reminiscent of nineteenth-century naturalists' classificatory schemes), and the anonymous industrial building style favored by German architects. She argues that industrial building types impose themselves on our consciousness as the cathedral did on that of the Middle Ages, and that the Bechers' photographs - which seem at first glance only to record a vanishing landscape - serve to examine this shaping of our perceptions. Their work provides us with a rare opportunity to see how we see." "Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work, with 53 duotone plates and 126 additional illustrations, is the first book to delve deeply into the sources and vision behind the evocative and melancholy beauty of the Bechers' work. It will be indispensable both as a reference for students of postwar German photography and as a guide for readers who want to know how to approach the Bechers' monumental project."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.