Individual Buildings: A Little Argument with the Bechers
The late Bernd Becher and his wife and co-worker Hilla Becher are known especially for their photographs of industrial buildings. Their large body of work establishes them masters of typology, to be respected along with other master-typologists in the German tradition such as sociologist Max Weber and photographer August Sander.
The Bechers catalogued all sorts of constructed artifacts – silos, blast furnaces, mineral breakers, warehouses, etc., etc. Almost always these were buildings drawn from the world of manufacturing, commerce, and industry. Such photographs of structures represent not work and workers per se, but the organization of production on its larger scale. No workers, indeed no people, appear in these images. And many of the buildings seem archaic, as if one were viewing the archaeology - the dead or dying past - of production.
The Bechers present individual buildings as variants within Types. They typically photographed buildings head-on in black-and-white and in uniformly soft light. They often presented their work as multiple images in grids - for example, three columns and three rows, each square presenting one of nine different water towers.
Such grids prompt the viewer to look at the images comparatively, with variations appearing as leitmotifs and the Type taking over as the dominant theme. The grids can even be seen as little ‘comparison machines’ that manufacture a cognitive process in the mind of the viewer - much as the subject matter, the machines and buildings, once served to generate an industrial process. Though the viewer can’t help noticing variations, he or she is taught that the Type is the important subject matter. As a corollary, attention to diversity turns out to be a wasted or deviant kind of perception. The point is to see beyond the individuality of particular structures and to construct in one’s mind the Type-category that overarches them. (From this standpoint, viewing and appreciating the grids is a little like reading Marx and Plato simultaneously.)
Such a project conveys a post-Marxist / post-modern political message about the dominance of industrial processes and the way their physical forms arise, endure, and decay. Industrial development is a process on its own large scale, much larger than that of the overt subject matter of individual buildings (let alone individual human beings).
Of course the first way to strip buildings of their individuality and transform them into types is to turn all plumage and coloration into shades of gray; hence the uniformly soft-lit black-and-white character of the Bechers’ work.
And the second way is to stay close to the industrial sector, where form rigorously follows function. All silos or water towers or whatever, performing the same function, tend to differ only marginally in form. But move out of that sphere, and the varieties of human construction comprise a far more diverse array of signs, symbols, and icons. Atget and Evans are examples of photographers who, viewing broader fields of focus, called attention not only to Types but to the stunning variety of individual instances. They – especially Atget - pointed to the many dimensions of variance in the human condition.
There’s great merit in the Bechers’ style of photography and the worldview it conjures. We did indeed inhabit a shared industrialized (now post-industrial) society; that’s our history. But at the same time, this emphasis underplays the persistent diversity of human constructions. We still have among us a few poetically individualized buildings, such as Atget and Evans saw. And respect for them is healthy, even when it borders on nostalgia.
Human structures, seen in their individuality, need not be great monuments; they can be very small but still significant. Our structures are always more or less anthropomorphic, echoing what we want to do, who we want to be, or what we wish to present as a persona. We don’t always want to act like machines or live in nearly uniform boxes, and we often express this through our exterior and interior decor. In this way our buildings tell us – as if they were our echoes - that we’re separate creations, not just parts of a larger process.
These fourteen images are a brief ‘argument,’ then, against the Bechers’ view of the built world, and a plea for seeking and appreciating individuality. Like the Bechers’ work, these images also try to teach a way of seeing, but it’s the opposite one: that of looking for individual or ‘personal’ survivals that deviate from the industrialized or bureaucratized pattern.
VIEW INDIVIDUAL BUILDINGS