Gallery 01
About The Artist
The husband and wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing together in 1959. For close to fifty years, they documented architectural forms they collectively referred to as “anonymous sculpture.” Their extensive series of water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine tipples, framework houses of mine workers, and other vernacular industrial architecture — often technologies on the verge of obsolescence — comprise an in-depth study of the intricate relationship between form and function. The Bechers produced impeccable black and white photographs, using a large-format camera carefully positioned under overcast skies to record shadowless front and side elevation views of their subjects. Arranging these matched photographs in a grid, the Bechers produced what they called “typologies,” which grouped buildings by function, underscoring the similarities and differences between structures.
Gallery 02
Specifics
Bernd & Hilla Becher: Basic forms of industrial buildings (Schirmer/Mosel, 2004) | 161 pages with 60 duotones.
Source: https://archive.org/details/basicformsofindu0000bech.
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/) is a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more. It offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 2.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account. Books on Internet Archive are offered in many formats, including DAISY files intended for print disabled people. The list of my favorite photobooks on the Internet Archive you find here.
