The Bechers
April 24th, 2011
While many of us tire easily with repetition, Hilla and Bern Becher showed with photographs how productive a narrow focus can be, as they catalogued the architectural beauty of variations on an industrial theme, from East Germany to Appalachia. In 1959, they began a lifelong collaboration that ended only with Bernd’s death in 2006 (they married in 1961).
Their graphic presentation of photographs in grids has been successfully co-opted by graphic design in so many ways that it’s hard to see these grids for what they were when they first appeared.
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