Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photography can be considered conceptual art, typological study, and topological documentation. Their work can be linked to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement of the 1920s and to such masters of German photography as Karl Blossfeldt, August Sander, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Their photographs of industrial structures, taken over the course of forty years, are the most important body of work in independent objective photography. A keynote of their contributions to “industrial archaeology” has been their creation of typologies of different types of buildings; this book TYPOLOGIES, which accompanied a major retrospective exhibition, collects all known Becher studies of industrial building types and presents them as a visual encyclopedia.
Each chapter of TYPOLOGIES is devoted to a different structure – water towers, coal bunkers, winding towers, breakers (ore, coal, and stone), lime kilns, grain elevators, blast furnaces, steel mills, and factory facades
