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: And when did you actually begin to exhibit photographs?

BB: The first exhibition was in 1963 in the Nohl Gallery in Siegen.

HB: That was a bookstore.

BB: But a progressive gallery, also. In those days they exhibited Karl Otto Gotz, Peter Bruning, Winfred Gaul, Reinhold Kohler--a lot of Informel painting.

UEZ: So you made it into the category of art with your first exhibition?

BB: There was no other possibility. You have to imagine: even museums or institutes that exhibited photos wouldn't have exhibited us.

UEZ: Why not?

HB: Completely inartistic!

BB: They said, "You've photographed walls of houses!" There's no interpretation of our environment, no artistic interpretation of industry. If you look at the photos of Otto Steinert, how he photographed industry, that was a highly dramatic rendition, influenced by abstract art, by Surrealism. To say, "This winding tower is an object, and it is just as interesting on its own terms"--that was not possible. People like Reinhold Kohler in Siegen or the bookseller Nohl saw that it was interesting. We hadn't had an exhibition in Dusseldorf at that stage, although we lived there.

UEZ: Your first book was Anonymous Sculptures.

BB: Yes, but much later, not until 1970. The first catalogue was earlier, in the spring of 1967.

UEZ: Was there a time when you said to yourself that the book is perhaps the better medium? Doing photography for books?

BB: That's more likely to occur to someone today, now that reproduction technology is so good. When you stand in front of an original print, though, you can walk around in it. In terms of precision and of the range of shades, it is in a class by itself. And then the possibility of placing pictures together: this was how we arrived at our first typology. You can step right back, three, four, five meters, and you then have the whole thing, or you can go right up close and see every screw. That was the argument for the original photograph. A book was something else. There you have the whole topic in a limited form--leaf through it and put it down.

UEZ: How did you come to the idea of the typology?

BB: At Nohl's we used white-painted wooden frames, in which both vertical and horizontal formats could be shown. The frames were hung in two rows, one under the other in front of the bookshelves. This uniformity of presentation both established a type and drew attention to the small differences among examples of the type.

HB: The pressure that drove our work then was the first coal crisis, in the `60s, then the first steel crisis. We knew precisely ...

BB: ... that if we didn't photograph these structures right then, they would be lost. Even if we didn't like a particular one ...

UEZ: Didn't like it?

BB: If it was a building that had no aura, if it appeared boring. Then we photographed it nonetheless. Often the results were a surprise, particularly with wide-angle shots. If we had to stand close to a given structure to photograph it, only the wide angle could take it in, and only in the picture is it wholly visible. You can only judge an object as a whole when you have the necessary distance. Experience showed that the wide-angle shot should be taken from a height half that of the object, so that a normal view can be achieved again.