Gasometers

1973

BERND E HILLA BECHER

Gathered together in one frame are juxtaposed photographs capturing various gasometers from different angles. The weather and light is unchanging. This is the artists’ habitual way of working, allowing them to carefully analyze their selected industrial structures. Through neutralizing certain elements, such as colour, surroundings and stylization, the buildings are released into an impersonal aesthetic and thus create their own stylistic signature. The Becher select buildings to be immortalized on the basis of their appeal and their ability to evolve through time, doing away with any notion of their conservation.

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Dimensions

80 x 97,5 cm

Technique

Nine photographs printed on paper

Description

In an interview they state, “It is necessary that these things be destroyed when their use is exhausted.

This is purely economic architecture. They build the structure, they use it, they misuse it, they throw it away.”

The chosen types of structure and the way in which they are presented reveal an interest in sorts of hierarchical categorizations found in the biological sciences such as the Linnean system.

There is no human presence in their photographs so as to exclude the possibility of saying what other artists have already said and of placing the human dimension at the centre of their explorations. What interests Bernd and Hilla Becher is to provide a point of view, a grammar that allows the viewer an accurate reading of the structures photographed.