To date, Bernd and Hilla Becher are mentioned in one breath.. Hundreds furnaces, water, conveying and cooling towers, silos and factory buildings in Europe and the USA photographed the couple together for decades.
The cup-founded the “Düsseldorf School of Photography”, from which now world famous photographers like Andreas Gursky , Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer emerged
Last Saturday Hilla Becher died at the age of 81 years in Dusseldorf -. eight years after her husband Bernd. Hilla Becher had continued the joint photographic work, which today – so the publisher Schirmer / Mosel -. “An indispensable part of the recent history of art” is
As natural scientists in the 19th century collected the cup recordings and created typologies architectural industrial dinosaur. Nobody, businesslike and cool are the black and white series, which the couple became world famous. This aesthetic they gave to their students on. As with the cup are also Gursky, Höfer and Struth distance and coolness formative stylistic device.
The “cup” class has become legendary and the “Düsseldorf School of Photography” Today a quality label in the art market. But she would not have been possible without the contribution and the close cooperation between Hilla Becher. Both developed together since the late ’50s a unique photographic work, which today is one in spite of the conservatism and its monolithic character to modern art. The art historian Armin Second spoke of a “epochal oeuvre, away from any artistic egomania and arrogance”.
Many awards, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale until Goslar Kaiser Ring, the cup had accepted jointly. Verganges year, born in Potsdam on September 2, 1934 Grand Dame of photography was still awarded the highly doped Great Rheinische Culture Award.
“It’s clear, I got the price also because I left am “, said Hilla Becher at the award ceremony in Dusseldorf with an incomparably dry humor. And then she greeted her Bernd – “wherever he is, up or down.” Bernd Becher was always something in the foreground, because he held the first professorship of artistic photography at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the mid-70s.
Even with 13 years Hilla Becher made her first photographic experiments and was the beginning of the 50s trained at the prestigious Potsdamer Atelier Walter Eichgrün. In 1957 she got a job at an advertising agency in Dusseldorf and learned the art academy students Bernd Becher know. In 1959 the couple’s photographic collaboration.
The Lady with the snow-white pageboy told at the presentation of the Culture Prize of these beginnings. She dragged her husband the heavy photographic equipment through the hallways demolition threatened factories where still were drifting toxic, sleepy-causing gases. “The collaboration with Bernd was so far productive because we have very good complements”, said Hilla Becher, who was foreign to any pathos. They were of the same opinion Almost always.
Very few people give industrial facilities in the country, built by nameless architects attention. For the cup but that almost encyclopaedic ordering forms and structures of buildings of a declining industrial landscape was a life issue. So the art of the cup is now also known as photographic memory of an industrial past.
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