NARRATOR
Joanne Heyler
JOANNE HEYLER
For a lot of artists who were born around the time of World War II, they grapple with the aftermath and the recovery and the ambivalence that was so present in their culture as Germans during the '50s, '60s and later.
NARRATOR
Bernd and Hilla Becher are showing a fading empire, a post-World War II Germany. Isolated, empty, abandoned-looking, one after another, water tower after water tower... The monotony is the point. It is a structure that generally remains the same, but when seen in groups, architectural idiosyncrasies emerge.
JOANNE HEYLER
I think that there is, …a sort of obsession with a decaying industrial powerhouse, or an ambivalent relationship to the very notion of the industrial.
NARRATOR
The Bechers captured these monolithic industrial relics as formal symbols for the end of an era. They highlight the water tower’s sculptural qualities as if they were monuments, memorializing a bygone way of life by smaller, more uniform, and digitized industries.
NARRATOR
The Bechers inspired a generation of artists such as Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky—all of whom are in the collection here. They found photography’s mission not to be the representation of an ideal world, but instead the revelation of the actual world.