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

UEZ: Can you separate this memory from that of the Third Reich?

BB: I once spoke about that with Jeff Wall, when we were looking at an exhibition of picture books about the Nazi period. He said that there was nothing special about the picture books apart from the flags, which can be seen in almost every shot. Also, there was the permanent artificial euphoria of the marches, all those men in uniform. I certainly saw the suburban houses with steep gables as unpleasant Nazi architecture, even as a child, although I couldn't put it into context. In Siegen in the `30s, there were also barracks built in this style. But I have always thought that the industrial world is completely divorced from this. It has absolutely nothing to do with ideology. It corresponds more to the pragmatic English way of thinking.

HB: It would be impossible anyway to process something that one viewed entirely negatively. Someone who concerns himself with scorpions must love them to a certain extent. And photography is there precisely to portray what is, not to sort and reproduce only the good and the beautiful. A war photographer doesn't take his pictures because he loves war. Nonetheless, one has one's thoughts, and we don't see industry as a solely positive force. Industry has its crises and excesses, its warmongering characteristics. We have always tried to take a neutral stance in its presentation, and not to engage in glorification.

UEZ: Would it be right then to infer that, with your systematization, you have looked for a standpoint free of ideology?.

HB: Yes, because the work wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

UEZ: You have almost become cultural ambassadors, who travel from country to country and compare industrial buildings. Although you see specific national traits, you don't make judgments.

HB: It's not the Olympics!

BB: Of course, we have our preferences. If you commissioned an industrial historian or someone from the field of industrial archeology, he would see things quite differently. We have favored the pragmatic buildings.

UEZ: Everything that's overloaded, monumental, the castle and palace romanticism of heavy industry, the Art Nouveau buildings, everything that creates particular forms, you have avoided?

BB: We've avoided that. Because we said to ourselves: the soul of industrial thought is shown in the opposite of that.

UEZ: It's remarkable that the Americans have a word for this--the vernacular--and we don't.

HB: It can't even be described in German!

UEZ: Do you see an elemental connection of photography to the vernacular?

HB: Yes, a fundamental one. For me, photography is by its very nature free of ideology. Photography with ideology falls to pieces.

--translated by Michael Herd

Author: Ulf Erdmann Ziegler is a Frankfurt-based writer and critic. He curated "The World as One: Photography from Germany after 1989," an exhibition currently touring Asia.

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