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: You then made two books for Prestel Publisherss: The Architecture of Winding and Water Towers and Zollern 2. At that time, in the `70s, you seem to have been enlisted by the industrial historians.

HB: That's how it was, too!

BB: They wanted to write a text, and garnish their text with our photos.

HB: They couldn't imagine that photographs could stand on their own. They wanted to give it a scientific basis.

UEZ: Did you ever consider that the easier path might have been to ally yourselves with the historians?

BB: On the contrary, it was quite dreadful.

HB: It was a bad experience. Working with them, we felt for the first time that we weren't free. We got a stipend, then, and delivered the work. Then, all at once, a flurry of requests, ideas, conditions. One had to become expert in technical history.

UEZ: Did the publications help you, or did they do you harm?

BB: We made the best of it: we did the book layout, chose the sequence, wrote a small text ourselves.

UEZ: But you didn't end up employing your typographical knowledge in order to earn money, as you had planned in your time at the academy.

BB: Oh yes, I developed a couple of company logos and accepted a couple of graphic commissions.

UEZ: You developed logos?

BB: Yes. Well, not the Mercedes star. And Hilla had great commissions.

HB: And even some very adventurous ones. In those days there were world expositions all over. It was the time when Germans started to look outward again. There was an architecture firm, Lippsmeier, and I worked for 15 years with them. Then came the German pavilions at world fairs--in New York, in Chicago, in Buenos Aires, in Helsinki. I often went along, helped with the setting up and documented it afterward. I was in the Sudan for a while, then in Senegal. I collected ideas for interior designs: material, photos and drawings, by other people, too. Whatever fitted the topic: world exhibitions of medicine ...

BB: The toy exhibition was very beautiful.

HB: In Chicago. For that I did research in the museum in Nuremberg. One could earn quite a lot of money. The Buenos Aires exhibition paid for our next car, and also the costs and the trips. It was short-term, intensive work, which financed the rest of the year.

UEZ: It's not something that initially springs to mind, but it is a fact that the start of your work together coincides with the beginnings of English and American Pop art. Do you remember seeing the first things by Warhol? I mention Warhol because of the seriality.

HB: Before Warhol, we saw Lichtenstein, in Alfred Schmela's gallery. But you're asking about the serial element. The serial element for us resulted from our having collected so much material on certain topics. But our idea of showing the material has much more to do with the 19th century, with the encyclopedic approach used in botany or zoology, where plants of the same variety or animals of the same species are compared with one another on the individual pages of the lexicon. It became more and more clear to us that there are definite varieties, species and subspecies of the structures we were photographing. That is, in effect, an old-fashioned approach. Later it was also used in Conceptual art, logically enough.