Bernd & Hilla Becher | Sprüth Magers
Bernd and Hilla Becher, a husband-and-wife team of photographers, worked in projects, from 1959 until the early 2000s. They documented, with great meticulousness, industrial forms. Factories, cooling towers, gas holders. All in icy black and white. They then exhibited these photographs, grouped thematically.
I praised Luigi Ghirri, a similarly celebrated postwar photographer, on this site a couple of weeks ago. Like Ghirri, there’s a mathematical precision with their work. Unlike Ghirri, there is no lyricism, no romanticism, simply a wish for transparent documentation.
There’s beauty in there too, though. I saw it at Sprüth Magers, hosting a new exhibition of the Bechers’ work. Specifically, a row of five water towers, on one gallery wall. A pair from Italy, a pair from France. One from Belgium.
Even with the photographers’ rigour and unsentimentality, their wish to show these architectural forms and make no further comment, I found them deeply evocative. The Italian towers spindly, pretty, with lush scrubland around the base. (In one, there’s an ancient-looking church in the background.) The French uncompromisingly conical, heavy, concretely modern.
Not to mention, they’re gorgeously sharp and lush as images, too. It’s impossible to be entirely dispassionate about such things, especially when you invest so much time and energy for the travelling, the setting up, the exposing, the framing, the minutiae of project delivery.
What captures us is their love for their craft, as much as the forms they portray. They loved each other, too, else how could they have worked on these multi-decade projects together? Yes, I wrote love.
Bernd & Hilde Becher is at Sprüth Magers (London). 20 February - 28 March 2026