Bernd and Hilla Becher: Four Decades

In 1957 German husband-and-wife photography team Bernd and Hilla Becher began documenting water towers, silos, barns, and other industrial architecture. Their objective “typologies” of functionalbuildings recorded the vanishing traces of an industrial past and were shown in the influential 1975 New Topographics exhibition at George Eastman House. In this video, shot during the couple’s 2005 retrospective at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, the Bechers discuss their beginnings as documentarians of 19th-century industrial architecture.