Bernd & Hilla Becher - Lot with 2 books: Coal Mines and Steel Mills & Typologien - 2010-2023

You're bidding on two books by Bernd & Hilla Becher.

Bernd and Hilla Becher were two German photographers whose systematic documentation of their country’s industrial landscape has served as the basis for an entire school of contemporary photography. Their black-and-white images served as visual case studies or typologies of disappearing architectural relics—water towers, grain silos, gas tanks—forming the basis of their practice. “I became aware that these buildings [blast furnaces] were a kind of nomadic architecture which had a comparatively short life—maybe 100 years, often less, then they disappear,” the artists said of their work. “It seemed important to keep them in some way and photography seemed the most appropriate way to do that.”

Bernd & Hilla Becher - Coal Mines and Steel Mills
Schirmer/Mosel, 2010
Hardcover, 188 pages, German/English
28x28cm
As new in seal

The core themes of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s extensive work from the early 1960s on were the coal mines and steel mills in the German ruhr region and other iron smelting regions of the world, from Lothringen to Pittsburgh. The book centers on the ‘industrial landscapes,’ as the two artists called them.

Bernd & Hilla Becher – Typologien
Publisher: Schirmer/Mosel, 2023
Softcover, 256 pages, German
Size: 28.9×28.8cm
New in seal

Bernd & Hilla Bechers Typologies, published in 2003 as a catalog of the art collection North Rhine-Westphalia, has now become a standard work of our house. It contains 130 – and thus almost all existing – compilations of individual photographs of the same building types as tableaus. A total of twelve material groups of industrial buildings, from water towers to gas containers, cooling towers, grain silos or mines to factory halls, prepared the cups in numerically different typologies. The condensed abundance of the material – all in all 1528 recordings – allows comparative vision and combines scientific systematics and aesthetic empiricism. The volume with a text by Armin Zweite and a work chronicle by Susanne Lange is offered in the anniversary year as a broached edition at a special price.