A river for millions
New York, November 2011. At Christie’s a photograph was auctioned that shows little more than stripes: grey sky, green bank, the grey water of the Rhine, a footpath, more green. Andreas Gursky had photographed the motif near Düsseldorf and removed buildings and walkers on the computer. Rhein II fetched around 4.3 million dollars, at the time the highest known price for a photograph.
Gursky had studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the class of Bernd Becher. With him and his fellow students, Düsseldorf became one of the most important places in the world for photography.
Water towers as sculptures
It all began with a couple. From 1959, Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed industrial structures that were soon to be demolished: winding towers in the Ruhr and the Siegerland, blast furnaces, cooling towers, gas holders, half-timbered houses. They worked with a large plate camera, always frontally or slightly from above, always under an overcast sky, without people. They arranged the pictures in grids so that structures of the same type became comparable.
They titled their first major book, in 1970, Anonymous Sculptures. Suddenly the industrial structures looked like works of Minimal Art. In the 1970s the Bechers were shown in major exhibitions of Conceptual Art, such as documenta 5 in 1972.
The Becher class
In 1976 Bernd Becher became professor of photography at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Hilla Becher, who had created the work as an equal partner, did not receive a professorship of her own but helped shape the teaching. Until 1996, numerous photographers studied here who later became internationally known.
Candida Höfer photographs empty libraries, theatres and museums. In the 1980s Thomas Ruff made huge portraits of his fellow students, as objective as passport photos. Thomas Struth, who had previously studied with Gerhard Richter, shows visitors in front of famous paintings in his Museum Photographs. Axel Hütte, Tata Ronkholz, Petra Wunderlich, Elger Esser and many others developed distinctive styles of their own.
Large, colourful, digital
The students soon went beyond their teachers. Instead of small black-and-white prints came huge colour photographs that hang on museum walls like paintings. Andreas Gursky made early use of digital editing to condense supermarket shelves, stock-exchange floors and crowds, as in 99 Cent of 1999. The documentary rigour of the Bechers thus turned into a photography that shows the globalised world as pattern and surface.
Recognition
In 1990 Bernd and Hilla Becher received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, tellingly in the category of sculpture. Bernd Becher died in 2007, Hilla Becher in 2015.
Why it still matters
The Düsseldorf School of Photography played a decisive role in establishing photography in the great museums and on the art market on an equal footing with painting. Its objective gaze, its thinking in series and its large formats still shape photography today. For Düsseldorf it is, after the Düsseldorf School of painting, Zero and Beuys, another chapter in Düsseldorf’s art history.
Further reading
- Bernd and Hilla Becher: Anonyme Skulpturen: Eine Typologie technischer Bauten (1970, in German).
- Stefan Gronert: The Düsseldorf School of Photography (2009).