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: So you were fellow students at the academy.

HB: Yes, until 1961.

UEZ: Then you had both finished your studies?

HB: There was no such thing as having finished. You stopped when you thought it enough.

BB: Essentially we had finished long before, but we stayed on at the academy, because this darkroom was there, to put it simply.

UEZ: Mrs. Becher, you are trained as a photographer. Where were you trained?

HB: I took up photography on my own, at the age of 12 or 13, with very inadequate means: it was soon after the war, and the only supplies were from before the war. But one could get hold of what was needed, one way or another, on the black market. My mother had learned photography in her youth. She was a photographer, but didn't continue with it. She bought me a camera and let me mix up a few chemicals. All that took place in Potsdam, so already in the GDR. Later on I found myself a proper apprenticeship.

UEZ: With whom did you train?

HB: With an elderly man named Walter Eichgrun, who was--like his father and grandfather--a photographer for the Prussian court in Potsdam. He had an enormous archive of large plates dealing with the court. Political events at court, photographed in the 19th-century manner, with cameras and lenses of the period. There hadn't been anything else for a long time, again because of the war. The studio was as if it were from the time of the Empire, with black ebony furniture and heavy drapes; we called it "the crypt." It was clear to me, however, that it was a very good apprenticeship. Eichgrun photographed meticulously and had a very good knowledge of composition, light and shadow, perspective. He was also prepared to explain it. He had a studio that took up a whole floor of a house in Potsdam, and he did everything he was commissioned to do--portraits, shots of objects and a lot of architecture. He was very good at it and highly sought after. At the time I worked with him, he was commissioned to photograph Sans Souci, the park, the palaces, the rooms, the statues. I always went along, dragging odds and ends of equipment.

This was from about 1951 to 1953. I had left school early. That had quite a bit to do with the fact that I couldn't always keep my mouth shut. There came a time when I chose to leave rather than be expelled. I was barely 17. When we made our escape, I was 19. The apprenticeship was over by then.

UEZ: Yet your training was rather unusual. What did the photographer at Sans Souci regard as good photography?

HB: what is regarded today as good 19th-century photography: clear, clean images--with a complete tonal range, with appropriate depths--devoted to the subject.

UEZ: But you're describing the photography of the 20th century. In the 19th century there was a preference for soft lines, vedutas ...

HB: There were two strains in 19th-century photography, and this was the strain of direct, descriptive photography. The portraits were not at all unlike the portraits of August Sander. Sander is also--for me--a 19th-century photographer, a bit oriented toward painting. These people knew exactly how to show a hand, how to incorporate it into the picture, the shoulders slightly turned, the farther side of the face receiving the most light, the hair lit from behind.