The compelling story of the collaboration of the most important husband-and-wife team in the history of photography; a lavishly illustrated critical assessment of their lifelong project of documenting the industrial landscape of the twentieth century.

Typological, repetitive, at times oddly humorous, Bernd and Hilla Becher's photographs of industrial structures are, in their cumulative effect, profoundly moving. The Becher's serenely cool, disarmingly objective, and notoriously obsessive images of watertowers, gas tanks, grain elevators, blast furnaces, and mine heads have been taken over a period of almost thirty years, under overcast skies, with a view camera that captures each detail and tonality of wood, concrete, brick, and steel. Blast Furnaces represents a continuation of, but also a counterpoint to the Bechers' earlier book Watertowers. There basic functional elements were hidden or clothed in disguises, whereas the 256 duotone prints included here record a purely functional and exposed architecture, built to contain heat, pressure, and accumulations of gases and unhindered by any outside constraints. The blast furnace is the symbol of the steel industry. Like other building types which attract the Bechers, it is also an endangered industrial species. Essentially giant, cone-shaped circular stoves, blast furnaces dominate the cityscapes of Pittsburgh, Youngstown, and Birmingham much as religious structures dominated medieval cities. These photographs, taken between 1961 and 1989, convey the unique characteristics, physical complexity, and eerie presence in the landscape of blast furnaces in Great Britain, Belgium, France, Austria, Germany, and the United States. Bernd and Hilla Becher teach at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. They began their collaborative photographic enterprise in 1957, when they did a study of workers' houses in their native Germany. The Bechers follow in a distinguished line of German photographers that includes August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Werner Manz, all of whom contributed in different ways to the definition of "objective" photography. A selection of their photographs is on view throughout 1990 at the Dia Art Foundation galleries in New York, and they will represent Germany in the 1990 Venice Biennale.

A photographic collection, falling somewhere between topographical documentation and conceptual art, catalogs a village of houses built between 1870 and 1914 in the Siegen region of Germany, one of the oldest iron-producing areas of Europe.

An encyclopedic collection of all known Becher industrial studies, arranged by building type.

This volume is an essential addition to the Bechers' body of work, devoted to their images of rock-processing plants and lime kilns taken in Germany, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and Great Britain throughout the 1980s and '90s. Each structure is unique, its details dependent upon the region and the date of its construction, and the book features buildings whose essential function is ancient but remain important today. Although a small number of these images have been included in previous monographs, this is the first publication to showcase a comprehensive collection of the Bechers' study of stonework and lime kilns. Whether presenting single shots or their signature typological grids, the Bechers created a photographic testament to the industrial revolution that so emphatically shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, however, they also captured a much-older manufacturing tradition: the quarrying and processing of stones.

Gathers photographs of watertowers in the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, and France and describes the authors approach to industrial photography

The more than two hundred striking duotone plates in Hilla and Bernd Becher's Industrial Facades continue the famousD?orf photographers' formal investigation of industrial structures, in this case the frontal elevations of factory buildings. Like the Bechers' earlier books on water towers, blast furnaces, and gas tanks, Industrial Facades once again clearly displays their serenely cool, rigorous approach to the structures they photograph as vaariations on an ideal form. The Bechers make no attempt to analyze or explain their subjects. Captions contain only the barest of information: time and place. Industrial Facades covers the whole range of periods and designs representing this building type: from austere brick buildings of the early industrial age and the arched windows and turrets decorating historicist facades, to the concrete and glass functionalist constructions of the 1950s and 1960s, to today's rectangular, windowless halls. These photographs give the lie to Louis Sullivan's often misunderstood motto, "form follows function," for the external appearance of the factory buildings shown here are hardly determined by their internal working processes. For this reason, the Bechers' photographs do not really illustrate the development of modern industrial architecture, nor the achievements of functionalist building, but rather the achievements of banal, everyday architecture, produced by builders trained in crafts or by engineers trained in the necessities of the industrial process. * Not for sale in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Austria