Photography: Beauty in the Awful

Bernhard Becher is one of the few people in the world who hate to see a bright sunny day. Before his blonde wife Hilla even pouts on the morning tea in their Düsseldorf apartment, she looks outside, hoping to see the kind of lead-gray overcast for which Germany’s Ruhr Valley is noted. Becher’s concern with the weather is not a matter of whim. He is a photographer, his subject the collieries, mills, water towers and other rugged structures of Europe’s coal and steel industries. Only a dull diffused light, he has found, can properly set off the austere, utilitarian designs produced by the Industrial Revolution long before Bauhaus theoreticians made a cult of functionalism.

If the day is right, Bernhard and Hilla pile their assorted cameras and tripods, plus the makings of a picnic, into their rattling Volkswagen bus and head for the slag heaps. When they are not on a long haul to the coal fields of Liège, Belgium, or the grimy Bassin du Nord of France, they ply a favored route leading from Düsseldorf into the heart of the Ruhr, home of Germany’s coal and steel industries. Before a visit to Oberhausen recently, Becher had made contact with one of the plant offices, cajoled plant guards with a few cases of beer, and cut down a few shrubs on a nearby slag heap. When he returned, photographic equipment in hand, he found a splendid view of an awful sight. There, in the foreground, were four huge blast furnaces, with the rest of smelly Oberhausen beyond.

Anonymous Sculpture. The Bechers’ interest in photographing what most people prefer to forget has understandably raised many a questioning eyebrow. “The hardest thing when I first started was getting permission,” says Bernhard. “They thought I was crazy.” Descended from coal miners and steel workers, Becher came to his interest in industrial relics naturally. At first he pursued a painting career, soon found that the sights that captivated him were factories, machinery, construction sites.

One day, while making a sketch of the superstructure of an iron-ore mine, he learned that it would be torn down in a matter of days and hustled off to get a camera to photograph it. When he saw the prints, he decided that sketching was futile. “These things are so full of fantasy there is absolutely no sense in trying to paint them,” he says. “I realized that no artist could have made them better.” His wife Hilla, a trained studio photographer, acts as bag boy, lens handler, bookkeeper and darkroom technician. Together, they have dedicated themselves to recording what they call the “anonymous sculpture” of the Industrial Revolution. In the past few years, their photographs have been displayed in museums in Germany, Holland, Denmark and the U.S.

History’s Representatives. Unlike most people who see their work, the Bechers are not interested in preserving the industrial relics they photograph. “It is necessary that these things be destroyed when their usefulness is exhausted,” says Bernhard. “This is purely economic architecture. They throw it up, they use it, they misuse it, they throw it away.” But more than one historical commission has decided to preserve an old water tower or mill after the Bechers photographed it. That fact makes plant managers wary of the husband-and-wife team, whose mere interest in an obsolete object may induce local do-gooders to pass an ordinance forbidding its destruction.

Today, with nearly every notable 19th century industrial structure in Western Europe safely preserved on film, the Bechers look forward to focusing more on objects of the future. The one such object that they see as “utterly representative of its period in man’s history” is the spidery lunar module that successfully carried men to the moon.