The Bechers' Industrial Lexicon: in their first full-length interview ever, Bernd and Hilla Becher talk about the collaborative project that has occupied them for more than four decades: photographing and classifying the industrial structures that are even now vanishing from the modern landscape - Interview

BB: We did make a film once, on the Hannover mine.

HB: Actually, there's no need at all to talk about failures.

BB: Because that was such an enormous complex. We made a film about it because we wanted to show the atmosphere. Then we looked at the shots, still uncut, and were totally disappointed.

UEZ: How did you make the film?

HB: We borrowed a 16mm camera from Sigmar Polke. The advisor was Gary Schumm, in part, who has made a load of beautiful artist films, with Gilbert and George, for example. The idea was that this colliery was not a tightly knit conglomerate, as is usually the case, but rather a diffuse structure held together by belts, by roads.

BB: The atmospheric element was important. On top of that, we were in a hurry. We thought that if we photographed our way through the whole plant, it would take years. Then we made the film in two or three days.

HB: The thought was to drive through this very extensive industrial estate, to show the connections among preparation plant, winding tower, power plant and cokery. But as it turned out, there was so little movement there that the only movement in the film was provided by the camera.

UEZ: Because the colliery was already shut down?

HB: No. Strictly speaking, if you look at a mine like this, the only thing that moves is the wheel of the winding tower. I was thinking at the time of the early Charlie Chaplin films, where the camera sits on the tripod and everything else moves in front of it. Or Hitchcock's film Rope, which takes place in one room.

UEZ: How strange that you give us these examples, as in fact you didn't let the camera stay still.

HB: But panning the camera, up and down, right and left--that was no good.

UEZ: When did this experiment take place?

BB: 1973-74.

UEZ: Did you destroy the film in the end?

BB: No.

UEZ: We're talking about a black-and-white film?

BB: No, it was in color.

UEZ: If one is looking for the origins of your pictorial esthetic, people point most commonly to Karl Blossfeldt and to Renger-Patzsch. But you yourselves have always pointed to industrial photographs--often anonymous photographs.

BB: There are enormous archives, like the Krupp Archive, the archive of the Gutehoffnung [Good Hope] Foundry, which we looked at. We thought, all right, that exists, and what exists we don't have to do again. We do what hasn't already been done.

UEZ: If you got a tip-off now about a certain industry in Korea, would you get in a plane and photograph there?

HB: I would!

BB: Why should that be any different? Hilla was in Siberia, looked it over. There weren't any variations there that would contribute a great deal to the whole, let's say, on the subject of blast furnaces. We already have enough of them.

We are currently engaged in going through our archive. We can't afford to travel about so much these days, otherwise we would never be finished with what we've done. It's not a case of photographing everything in the world, but of proving that there is a form of architecture that consists in essence of apparatus, that has nothing to do with design, and nothing to do with architecture either. They are engineering constructions with their own esthetic. You need a certain number of forms to prove that, but at some point, you have got enough together. We are still photographing grain elevators, because there are new types of those, and we still don't have enough of the older ones. We are also still missing some types of refineries and chemical plants. We're not finished with lime kilns either.