Her career spanned more than 50 years and included photographs from the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Italy.

[5][7] The Bechers traveled in a Volkswagen photographing industrial sites all over Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, then eventually, Britain and the US.

In an interview with Süddeutche Zeitung Magazin, Hilla Becher claimed that her husband disliked photography at the beginning of the career.

[10] Their wide influence was also due to their roles as professors at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where some of their students included Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Ruff.

The beginning of their on-going project was part of the “...polemical return to the “straight” aesthetics and social themes of the 1920s and 1930s in response to the postpolitical and postindustrial subjectivist photographic aesthetics that arose in the early postwar period.” (Heckert, Virginia) Most subjects of the works of “...industrial structures-water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, mine heads, grain elevators, and the like-in the late 1950s.” (Heckert, Virginia) Bernd and Hilla Becher's once said about the works, “The idea is to make families of objects,” or, on another occasion, “to create families of motifs [that] become humanized and destroy one another, as in Nature where the older is devoured by the newer.” (Heckert, Virginia) Bernd and Hilla Becher's works are shown as a group to establish a “...movement itself from image to image to image aimed to be the story more than did the sum of the collected parts, regardless of whether it is the movement of the photographer himself or herself, or the camera, or the movement of our own eye as it skips from one photograph to the next.” (Heckert, Virginia).

Concepts such as ‘New Objectivity.’ Carrying forward Bernd and Hilla Becher's work is the machine age photographers, albeit complexly.

[13] Source:[15] In response to a post-war Germanic period, Becher's "subjective photography"[16] tries to humanize, naturalize, and synthesize Germany's history and idealization within the industrialized comportment.

The Machine Age brought a visual pace that was "ever-accelerating, ever expanding" and highly juxtaposed to the past, more subdued, Germanic lifestyle.

Becher's work was innovative in that, by capturing the post-war, she has ultimately defined Germany before mass industry and by the idealized past.

Stimson, from Tate Paper, writes "by shooting the grand icons of the Machine Age 'straight-on' so they do not, they have claimed 'hide or exaggerate or depict anything in an untrue fashion', by committing themselves to an ethic of representation free of bogus political elevation or degradation, they realize one leg of their generation's postmodern affect".