Bernd and Hilla Becher

level beyond the documentary whilst retaining some of its qualities thematically. In examining the photographic artworks of Gursky, it is integral to first look back at his development, the formative years that would come to mould and shape him as an artist. He was born in 1955 to a family that was already embedded in the photographic landscape with his father and grandfather working in commercial photography.1 In 1980 Gursky undertook an education at the hands of another influential photography pair, Bernd & Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie. The husband and wife team produced a series of photographs beginning in the late 1950s of industrial German buildings. The documentary connotations are clear; their intention was to preserve these machine-age buildings as they began to be demolished in the post-war period. It was a personal project of sorts, focusing their attention on areas where Bernd had grown up in a loose attempt to preserve his childhood landscape. Hilla recalled in a 2014 interview shortly before her passing that critics of the time imagined their works would be “boring [...] and documentary only”.2 This raises the question; what makes the Becher’s photographs ‘artworks’ and not just diagrams for textbooks on industrial-era architecture? The answer lies in their treatment of the photographs. They were interested in preservation to an extent but also “with what Kevin Lynch called ‘a pattern of sequential experiences’”.3 This concept presents itself in…

Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher, Duisburg-Bruckhausen, Ruhr Region, Germany, 1999 The photograph seems to be a landscape of houses and factories. The houses are clustered together on one side of the photograph while the factories sit on the opposite side. A road seems to divide the cluster of houses and the factories. Duisburg-Bruckhausen shows that photography is a medium towards understanding the subject being photographed. The Duisburg-Bruckhausen, in particular, hints the viewer of what it once…

putting new idea’s into these abandoned giants, and many have turned out as very successful projects but the disappearance will continue. Many gasometers have been planned to be demolished, and in 2013 the English National Grid announced their plans to demolish 76 gasometers across England, and Scotland have planned to demolish 111 over the next 16 year’s. Novelist Will Self described their disappearance as ‘’ Just another casualty of the ruthless spatialisation of international flows that is…

9 Palms Manifesto Bernd and Hilla Becher were born in 1931 and 1934. They were german conceptual artists, first meeting at their college, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Collaborating on their first project in 1959, the pari photographed disappearing German industrial architecture. These works would be only done on 8x10 inch film. Always shot objectively, on cloudy days, to avoid shadows. They favoured early morning light as well. They arranged the photos in rows, helping to display the…

The artist constructs a model from cardboard, referring to a real or imaginary image, then he make a photograph of the model, which is to be destroyed afterwards. Thomas Demand, born in 1964 in Munich, is among the most outstanding artists of our times, primarily a sculptor-slash-photographer, active also as a curator. Demand began his art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (1987-90), but it was at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf (1990-2) and Goldsmith's College in London (1993-4),…

more conceptual and creative, and photographers started to try out different resources ad diagonal lines, lights and shadows in their photographic works, as well as other innovations as significant elements to highlight. View camera has the advantages that the lens could be shifted or tilted relative to its film plane; therefore it has been used for architectural photography traditionally. It allows the photographers to control the perspectives, and also a wide range of different creative…

coincide with those of fine art, and when photography became an art form in its own right. The lively creative environment gave artists a wild imaginary space, allowing for a fertile cross-pollination of influence. From Man Ray to Thomas Ruff, Hannah Hoch to Lucas Blalock, photography has become wilder and wilder, less constrained by traditional pictorial concerns and more open to experimentation. Not only in its aesthetic - huge technological advances were and are exerting their influence on…