Between Sequence and Seriality: Landscape Photography and its Historiography in Anonyme Skulpturen

Abstract

Though Bernd and Hilla Becher worked with photography from the 1950s, it was not until the publication of Anonyme Skulpturen: Eine Typologie technischer Bauten in 1970 that their work was introduced to a broad audience. Known for their documentation of Western European industrial architecture, this paper considers the difference in how the Bechers' photographic documents have been presented in exhibitions, and how they are presented in Anonyme Skulpturen. while their exhibited works are typological grids of industrial architecture, the book presents these typologies as sequences. The difference prompts these questions: what kind of historical data does documentary photography produce? Is its purpose progression or preservation, sequence or seriality? While the Bechers have admitted that their photographs are a way to preserve disappearing industrial architecture, the sequential aspects of Anonyme Skulpturen suggest more progressive meanings. Such a reading is antithetical to considerations of the Bechers that see their photographs as aesthetic statements that archive industrial forms while ignoring the social conditions of industry. Considering the structural components of Anonyme Skulpturen, this paper concludes that the book is a witness to the social conditions of industry, and presents a narrative of progress in post-war Western Europe centralized around the theme of deindustrialization.

Acknowledgements

This essay is a portion of my PhD dissertation, entitled “Unstable Ground: Photography Books and the Post-industrial Landscape, 1938–1975”. This project would not have been possible without the support and feedback of my dissertation director, Sally Stein, and members of my dissertation committee, Cecile Whiting and Catherine Liu. Research at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt, as well as a visit to the studio of Hilla Becher in the summer of 2008, was funded by a grant from the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. I would also like to acknowledge the Konrad Fischer Galerie and Sonnabend Gallery for their assistance. Finally, my research in Germany owes much to Hilla Becher's kindness, as well as the hospitality of Simone Nieweg during my stay in Düsseldorf.

Notes

1 My use of “sanitize” and “distance” are borrowed from Banham's comments.

2 The term is derived from Rosalind Krauss's “Photography's Discursive Spaces” in which she distinguishes two forms of photographic meaning, one that is taxonomic and belonging to empirical space, another which is aesthetic and belonging to exhibition space. While Krauss uses this distinction to critique what she sees as a misappropriation of nineteenth-century photography into the museum's exhibition space, the terms are productive in thinking about the discursive constraints of photographic meaning.

3 “In 1958 he made his first attempts with a Rolleiflex 6 ° 6 camera, photographing several different views of various industrial objects, including the Constanze mine in Haiger, in the Dill district” (Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work 14). On page 35 Lange notes that the Bechers first worked jointly in 1959.

4 In addition to using this phrase “old fashioned” to describe her work as a photographer, Hilla Becher relayed to me her early apprenticeship and subsequent “exam in front of the printer's industry in Handelskammer”. Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany. Virginia Heckert summarized the presence of this nineteenth-century aesthetic in the Bechers' work as follows: “they retain several aspects of a nineteenth century working procedure – the use of a large-format camera and black-and-white film, the attaining of proper vantage points only after much carrying of heavy equipment and contemplation of feasible lighting – the Bechers can be seen to be motivated by a nineteenth century aesthetic” (Heckert 41). In 1951, Hilla had been an apprentice to the commercial photographer Walter Eichgrün, whose studio in Potsdam was a family business dating back to the final decades of the nineteenth century. Lange, Bernd und Hilla Becher: Festschrift Erasmuspreis 2002 13–14. It was under Eichgrün's mentorship that Hilla became familiar with nineteenth-century large-format cameras and photographic printing technology, and particularly skilled in photographing architectural forms. In one prescient example, Hilla worked on a commission to photograph Sanssouci, Frederick the Great's former summer palace near Potsdam. The photographs Hilla prepared with Walter Eichgrün were then sold to the publisher Henschelverlag, which subsequently reproduced the images in a catalog entitled Sanssouci: Ein Beitrag zur Kunst des Deutschen Rokoko, ed. Willy Kurth (Berlin: Henschel Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1957). The book was reprinted multiple times, in 1962, 1964, and 1970. Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany.

5 “He [Eugen Michel] didn't ask how expensive it would be, because he said, I'm going to do it when the printing press is available, and so I'll print one sheet today, and one sheet in two weeks, and it doesn't matter when its ready.” Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany.

6 In an interview with Hilla Becher she noted that she and Bernd had been approached by a number of publishers, though none would allow them to reproduce their images in the manner they desired.

7 Though Hilla Becher has mentioned a need to continue their project, it is uncertain what publications or exhibitions will be produced in the coming years. Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany. Also see Becher, “Klar waren wir Freaks”.

8 See quote in note 6. Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany.

9 Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany.

10 These books were all published by Schirmer/Mosel in Munich, Germany.

11 Pennsylvania Coal Mine Tipples (1991), Gasbehälter (1993), Fabrikhallen (1994), Fördertürme (1997), Zeche Hannibal (1999), Industrielandschaften (2002), Kühltürme (2005), Getreidesilos (2006). These titles were all published by Schirmer/Mosel in Munich, Germany.

12 My statement excludes reviews of the books, short considerations within Susanne Lange's Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work, and Armin Zweite's “Bernd and Hilla Becher's ‘Suggestion for a Way of Seeing’: Ten Key Ideas” 7–35, and a couple of interview questions posed by James Lingwood in his interview “Bernd and Hilla Becher: The Music of the Blast Furnaces” 21–28.

13 Though the Bechers tended to take photographs from multiple angles for every structure they photographed, these are rarely shown together. See Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work 9. A similar technique can be found in their Fachwerkhäuser. That book's section “Houses from Different Views” reproduced several framework houses through sequential views. Ranging from three to eight images, the “Abwicklungen Enzelner Häuser”, more accurately translated as complete individual houses, walks the viewer around the exterior of the home. Reproduced in a book setting, such sequential reproductions take on a somewhat personalized tone. The individual reader is given the opportunity to experience the circumference around a given space. A similar format is pursued in section II of Pennsylvania Coal Mine Tipples, where the tipples are shown in four views, communicating the structure's entire circumference.

14 The “Silos” description in Anonyme Skulpturen refers to “Schüttgütern”. It is translated there as “tipping products”, though a more accurate translation would be bulk or surplus supply. Becher, Anonyme Skulpturen n. pag.

15 There were other moments of contact as well. In 1970 they had participated in the “Information” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and that year held their first exhibition at Galerie Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf. In 1968, prompted by Konrad Fischer, the Bechers went on a “field trip” with Robert Smithson to the industrial sties of Oberhausen, Germany (Lingwood, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert). In 1971 they took part in Fischer's landmark “Prospect 71” exhibition, then participated in Documenta 5 in 1972, the same year Douglas Huebler made a famously deadpan portrait of Bernd (Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece #101, 1972). Perhaps the most important contact occurred in 1969, when Konrad Fischer featured the Bechers at Art Cologne. In Fischer's booth, Eugen Michel left a stack of his Kunst-Zeitung 2, entitled “Anonyme Skulpturen”, which featured the Bechers' photographs. Free for the taking, it was picked up by Ileana Sonnabend, who was so enthralled with the images that she pursued the artists. Sonnabend Gallery has represented the Bechers since that time.

16 For Robert Smithson see “Quasi Infinities of the Waning Space” (1966) and “Ultramoderne” (1967). Both published in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: U of California P, 1996); Morris; see also Lee.

17 Kubler's synthesis can be seen to encompass nineteenth-century methods of natural history and biology as well. In particular, Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1909), which Hilla Becher mentioned in conversation, was a great influence on her thinking. Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany. Like Kubler's art historical method, Haeckel's organization of the natural world was anything but biological. Kunstformen der Nature privileged serial types over evolutionary sequence. As Michel Foucault has written of nineteenth-century natural history, “the naturalist is the man concerned with the structure of the visible world and its denomination according to characters. Not with life.” Haeckel's process is one interested in the “nomination of the visible” within a taxonomic grid of organization, which “reduces the whole area of the visible to a system of variables all of whose values can be designated, if not by a quantity, at least by a perfectly clear and always finite description”. For Haeckel, the natural order of things is not based upon the evolution of biological structures but in the ordering of types in a manner that leads to a visual description of their morphological differences. Foucault 161, 132, 136.

18 For full description of the framework houses, and how their unique architecture reflects economic conditions of the region, see the introduction, written by Bernd and Hilla, to their Fachwerkhäuser.

19 Hartwig 340–62. The “post-1968” comment comes from a comment by Hilla Becher. Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany. Other similar reviews are: BC; Greiner 28; Helfenstein 53–55.

20 BC IV; author's translation. See note 15 on Kunst-Zeitung.

21 For early interpretations of the Bechers within conceptual art see McShine; Foote 46–54; Danoff; Documenta 5 (Kassel: Documenta Gesellschaft, 1972); Andre, as cited previously. For early interpretations through the lens of fine art photography see Sobieszek 11–13; Heckert; Naef 9–12. Zweite (cited previously) is one writer who gives us some sense of ambiguity in their work:

22 Kohler 14–15. Cited here as it appears in Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work 190.

23 Beton-Informationen, Montan Cement 1 (1964); Beton-Informationen, Montan Cement 2 (1965); Kahmen, “Industriefachwerk” 21–31; Fischer 868–82; Hilla Becher, “Documenting Industrial History by Photography” 353–60, 373–77; idem, “Eine Wohnung voller Fördertürme” 22–23; Gasverwendung 27.1 (1967); Hilla Becher, “Wassertürme” 227–30; idem, “Pithead Archeology” 155–57; idem, “Wooden Cooling Towers” 472–476. Virginia Heckert mentions that Bernd Becher was working for a concrete company “with its own publisher” in 1963, which is perhaps represented here as the two Montan Zement publications. Heckert 12.

24 Bernd and Hilla Becher, “Wooden Cooling Towers” 472.

25 Bernd was referred to as a “German industrial archeologist” in “Wooden Cooling Towers” Bernd and Hilla Becher 472. See note 15 on Kunst-Zeitung.

26 Becher and Becher, “The Bechers' Industrial Lexicon” 100. Additionally, Hilla Becher has noted that “In America there were two scenes. One was the painter and sculptor scene and the other the photographer scene. We didn't fit into either. The photographers dismissed us in the conviction what we did was not arty enough and because we only depicted objects.” Jocks 168–175. Quoted here as translated in Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work 217.

27 Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany. On that note, a 1971 catalog for Walther Koenig lists Anonyme Skulpturen under the heading “monographs”, giving us some indication of the distributor's intentions for the book.

28 “Industrial photography of the 19th century was very interesting. Most of the companies, even smaller factories, had taken pictures of their plant. They were proud of it, and they had pictures taken. Bernd was collecting them, especially from the Siegen area. That was one of the important things for him. He collected old photographs that no one wanted anymore.” Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany. A few relevant sources on photography in industry include: Matz, Tenfelde; Sichel, From Icon to Irony; Wolfensberger et al.

29 Jocks, as translated in Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work 210.

30 Jocks, as translated in Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work 206. See also Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work 12.

31 Jocks, as translated in Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work 209. As illustrated in Industriebauten (1967), they had at one time considered warehouses as part of their project.

32 Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, Zeche Zollern 2: Aufbruch zur modernen Industriearchitektur und Technik. The book was part of a series entitled “Studien zur Kunst des 19. Jahrehunderts”. The Bechers were part of another project in the series entitled “Die Architektur der Förder- und Wassertürme. Industriearchitektur des 19. Jahrhunderts” (Munich: Prestel, 1971). Hilla recalls being extremely dissatisfied with the project, as the photographers had little control over how their photography would be used in a book devoted exclusively to industrial archeology. Hilla Becher, telephone interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 June 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany.

33 Hilla Becher, interview by Chris Balaschak, 19 August 2008, Düsseldorf, Germany. The site is now called Westfälisches Industriemuseum.

34 See “Foreword” in Fachwerkhäuser 7–9.

35 “Industriefachwerk: Betrag zu einer Morphologie des Siegerlandes”, Bauwelt 57.1/2 (10 January 1966): cover, n. pag.; author's translation.

36 A notable exception to their work in the ECSC countries is that the Bechers never took photographs in Italy, a founding member of the ECSC.