Bernd Becher

Bernd Becher, photographer: born Siegen, Germany 20 August 1913; married 1961 Hilla Wobeser (one son); died Rostock, Germany 22 June 2007.

Bernd Becher, together with his wife, Hilla, spent almost 50 years photographing thousands of industrial and architectural structures, such as blast furnaces, pitheads, grain silos, water towers and gas tanks, in Northern Europe and the United States.

Working always in black and white against a milky neutral sky, the Bechers created highly detailed, frontal "portraits" of these overlooked yet monumental structures. These images, when grouped together into grids and series, transcend any notions of dry record-keeping. Instead, there is something intensely moving, at times pathetic, and often anthropomorphic, about these edifices. Despite their overwhelming functionalism, they are a testament to human ingenuity, engineering skills and endeavour.

Bernd Becher described these unloved and unprotected structures as the sacred buildings of Calvinism. "Calvinism rejects all forms of art and therefore never developed its own architecture," he said. "The buildings we photograph originate directly from this purely economical thinking." The Bechers' work is now a lonely souvenir of the industries that underpinned Western economic success from the 19th century to the present day - often the buildings the Bechers were photographing were torn down the very next day. As Bernd Becher observed: "Nothing remains of the industrial age. So we thought our photos would give the viewer the chance to go back to a time that is gone forever."

The Bechers' work is a portrait of a lost world, using a lost technology - the gelatin silver prints, the large format plate cameras are now a thing of the past - and can never be repeated.

Bernd Becher was born in 1931 in Siegen, Germany. He started taking photographs as an aide to the paintings and drawings he was making of the local mining complexes. He met Hilla Wobeser, who had already had a brief apprenticeship as a photographer, while they were both attending Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and they started their collaboration in 1957, marrying in 1960. Their early married and working life reads like an esoteric road movie - living in cheap hotels or camper vans for months on end, accompanied by their young son Max.

They spent their days scouting for sites, negotiating access and waiting for days for the right weather conditions, and were even, on occasion, suspected of spying. They often developed warm relationships with workers and locals - they spoke fondly of their visit to South Wales in the 1960s and the close bond they developed with the mining community there.

Calling their first book in 1970 Anonymous Sculpture: a typology of technical buildings, the Bechers found the most receptive audience for their work not within the photographic community, but amongst artists such as Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Douglas Huebler, who were part of the emergent Minimalist and Conceptual Art movements. The Bechers' trademark grids of images, the simplicity of their frontal view, their anonymous and inexpressive quality, their obviously systemic and archival approach and their industrial subject matter, all contributed to their inscription as conceptual artists.

Unlike many conceptualists, however, who used the camera either as a dumb recording device or as a means to expose the duplicity of the photographic image, the Bechers prized the clarity and truthfulness of the medium, and were dedicated to producing highly detailed and informative prints. In this, they were following in the great tradition of the German New Objectivity photographers of the 1920s and 1930s August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch. In fact, like the work of Sander (that great documenter of the German nation in its totality) before them, their entire oeuvre should perhaps be viewed as a single gigantic work in progress - a visual memorial to our industrial heritage.

Becher was also renowned for his work as a hugely influential teacher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie where, from 1976 onwards, he helped to nurture a new generation of German photographers, most notably Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, who have since gone on to become leading figures within the contemporary art world. Like their mentor, the Becher students' success was largely due to the fact that they transcended their chosen medium to be viewed as artists rather than as mere photographers.

To some extent, the dominance of large-format, matter-of-fact, highly detailed colour photography (as practised by the Becher students and others) during the 1990s and up to the present day can be ascribed to the influence of the Bechers both as artists and teachers. Bernd Becher was a modest man, who often underplayed his role as a teacher, describing it as "showing by doing". What the Bechers achieved, and what they passed on to their students, was an aesthetic that allowed them to make precise and beautiful photographic images, which were also conceptually rigorous.

The Bechers rarely exhibited in London. The few occasions were in "Another Objectivity" at the ICA in 1988, and in 2003 "Cruel and Tender", Tate Modern's first foray into photographic history of the 20th century. In recent years, the Bechers enjoyed a wider and more public recognition for their work: they won an Erasmus prize in 2002 and a Hasselblad award for photography in 2004; and in 2004-05 their achievements were finally fully recognised in their native Germany, with a retrospective in their home town Düsseldorf, which toured to Munich, Paris and Berlin.

Emma Dexter