Bernd and Hilla Becher

He studied painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart from 1953 to 1956, then typography under Karl Rössing at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1959 to 1961.

[4] Meeting as students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957, Bernd and Hilla Becher first collaborated on photographing and documenting the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959.

After collating thousands of pictures of individual structures, they noticed that the various edifices – of cooling towers, gas tanks and coal bunkers, for instance – shared many distinctive formal qualities.

[8][9] They excluded any details that would detract from the central theme and instead set up comparisons of viewpoint and lighting through which the eye is led to the basic structural pattern of the images being compared.

[10] This principle, which is allied to the philosophy underlying the New Topographics movement, is most obvious in the two published series, Anonyme Skulpturen: Eine Typologie technischer Bauten and Typologien, Industrieller Bau, 1963–1975, in which the images are contrasted in groups of three.

[10] Another early project, which they pursued for nearly two decades, was published as Framework Houses (Schirmer/Mosel) in 1977, a visual catalog of types of structures, an approach that characterized much of their work.

On the couple's initiative the Zollern II/IV Colliery at Dortmund-Bovinghausen in the Ruhr, a historicism structure with the exception of the machine hall (Art Nouveau), was designated a protected landmark.

In 1966, they undertook a six-month journey through England and south Wales, taking hundreds of photographs of the coal industry around Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham and the Rhondda Valley.

[12] In 1974, they traveled to North America for the first time, touring sites in New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and southern Ontario, depicting a range of industrial structures, from coal breakers to wooden winding towers.

[15] In 1989–91, for an exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, the Bechers introduced a second format into their oeuvre: single images that are larger in size — twenty-four by twenty inches — and presented individually, rather than as gridded tableaux.

[16] In 1976, Bernd Becher started teaching photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (policy matters prevented Hilla's simultaneous appointment), where he remained on the faculty until 1996.

The Typologies installation was exhibited in 1994 at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto, and at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Münster.

Other retrospectives of the couple's work have been organized by the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kulture in Cologne (1999 and 2003), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2005) and Museum of Modern Art in New York (2008).