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: You'll have to find out about that, Mr. Ziegler!

BB/HB: [Laughter.]

UEZ: Let's go back to your first preferences. Is it so that you cannot get very much out of painting?

BB: No, it's the other way around. Painting interests me more than photography.

HB: The love was quite unrequited.

UEZ: You held a crucial position. Until then, there had been no photography classes in German art academies. The technical universities offered practical training. Otto Steinert, the teacher at the Folkwang School in Essen, didn't come from a practical background in photography, but his intention was to teach photography for advertising and journalism.

HB: One couldn't imagine anything else at the time.

UEZ: In the academy did you arrive at the point where the pure and the applied were not really separate, when people wanted to learn something too practical from you?

HB: I quite consciously didn't take those students. I took people like Thomas Struth, for example; I thought Streets was great. I might have done something like that myself, but since he did it, I didn't need to. That's a sort of job sharing. Or Candida Hofer, with her interiors; she can work for years on those. If someone works at something for a really long time, then something comes out of it. The artist becomes free through the work process itself, the daily routine.

UEZ: Did you give no assignments at all?

BB: In between projects, for people who were stalled. But that never worked. Either they are obsessed and it works, or it's better just to leave it.

UEZ: What was your subject called? Not industrial photography surely? And not artistic photography.

BB: It was the Becher photography class. I consciously didn't take people who had involved themselves with industrial photography, because I didn't want them to be influenced. With the exception of Claudia Farenkemper, who photographed excavators, the big coal excavators here in the Rhine area.

UEZ: When students came to you, did that mean that they had no pressing interest in the human image?

BB: No. In Candida Hofer's case, for example, she had been photographing Turkish families. When she finished working with slides and moved on to the print, she more or less decided to use rooms as her subject matter. But that developed out of her work on the families.

UEZ: As to the question of color versus black and white, was that ever an ideological question in the Becher class?

BB: It was obvious that color had to come. We had acquired a small series in color by Stephen Shore--bought or exchanged--and the photographs hung here, for all our visitors to see. That had a certain influence.

HB: The students were basically well informed. I wouldn't restrict the influence to Stephen Shore.

BB: Even so, Stephen Shore, as one of the first, did large-format color pictures quite pictorially.

HB: There was a whole bunch of American photographers who worked with precision and professionalism. The view camera is actually a great American tradition.

UEZ: If you consider today your pupils Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky, you can see that the notion of the photographic series didn't play a big role for either. A single work can be simply taken out of Ruffs groups of work; it can stand alone. Gursky's case I find even more astonishing. Although he has a pictorial esthetic, the pictures are completely isolated by their size alone. It often happens that two pictures side by side are weaker than just one.