Bernd and Hilla Becher were central figures in post-war photography whose pioneering discipline reshaped the medium and profoundly influenced contemporary artistic practice.
Beginning their collaboration in the late 1950s, husband and wife Bernd and Hilla Becher developed a serial approach grounded in objective clarity: water towers, blast furnaces, cooling towers, mineheads, and other industrial structures were photographed frontally, under uniform conditions, and organized into typologies that revealed variations within repetition. Through their precise visual language and unwavering commitment to the documentary value of photography, Bernd and Hilla Becher redefined the relationship between image, architecture and memory, leaving an enduring imprint on both photography and conceptual art.
As founders and longtime professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the Bechers also taught and mentored a generation of influential photographers—including Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth—who each developed a distinctive artistic voice while inheriting their rigorous, methodical approach to photography. It was this community of students, shaped directly through the Bechers’ teaching, that would later be collectively identified as the Düsseldorf School of Photography.
The Bechers' work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions, including a significant retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2022), which subsequently travelled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as exhibitions at the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2005) and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004). They also participated in leading international exhibitions such as Documenta in Kassel (2002, 1982, 1977, 1972) and the Venice Biennale (1990), where they were awarded the Golden Lion.
Their oeuvre is represented in prominent collections worldwide, including Tate Modern, London and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, while the SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne preserves their archives.