Хилла Бехер: Германия фотосуретінің шебері

German conceptual photographer

Hilla Becher (; 2 September 1934 – 10 October 2015) was a German conceptual photographer. Becher was well known for her industrial photographs, or typologies, with longtime collaborator and husband, Bernd Becher. Her career spanned more than 50 years and included photographs from the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Italy. Becher, alongside her husband, received the Erasmus Prize and the Hasselblad Award. The Bechers founded the Düsseldorf School of Photography in the mid 1970s. In 2015, she died from a stroke at age 81, in Düsseldorf.

Becher was born in Potsdam, East Germany. Her mother attended Lette Haus, a photography school for women, and occasionally worked in a studio, retouching photographs. Her father was a high school language teacher, later drafted to World War II. Hilla Becher was exposed to photography early in life. Becher began photographing at thirteen years old with a 9×12 cm plate camera. Becher photographed her teachers in high school. She printed and sold photographs at postcard size for the teachers. She was expelled from high school and became an intern for Walter Eichgrun, a working studio and commissioned photographer, in 1951, while studying photography at a vocational school and finishing her high school degree in Berlin. She spent three years working on commission with Eichgrun and did various solo assignments. In 1954, she and her mother moved to West Germany, where she worked as a freelance photographer in Hamburg. In 1957, she was offered a job in Düsseldorf, Germany as an advertising photographer and around 1958, she enrolled into the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Walter Breker studying graphic design and printing techniques. The Bechers traveled in a Volkswagen photographing industrial sites all over Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, then eventually, Britain and the US. In an interview with Süddeutche Zeitung Magazin, Hilla Becher claimed that her husband disliked photography at the beginning of the career. Originally a sketch artist, Bernd believed that photography was more a "means to an end" to further detail in his sketches rather than its own artistic medium. In the same interview, Hilla maintained that though the couple worked as a team, Bernd was the driving force because he was more of a perfectionist than she was. Bernd died at 75 years old on 22 June 2007 from complications during heart surgery. By that time, their work had achieved worldwide acknowledgements, fascinating other photographers such as Stephen Shore. Their wide influence was also due to their roles as professors at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where some of their students included Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Ruff. The couple, after Hilla's death in 2015, is survived by their only son, Max Becher, and his two children.

The beginning of their on going project was part of the “ polemical return to the “straight” aesthetics and social themes of the 1920s and 1930s in response to the postpolitical and postindustrial subjectivist photographic aesthetics that arose in the early postwar period.” (Heckert, Virginia) Most subjects of the works of “ industrial structures water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, mine heads, grain elevators, and the like in the late 1950s.” (Heckert, Virginia) Bernd and Hilla Becher's once said about the works, “The idea is to make families of objects,” or, on another occasion, “to create families of motifs [that] become humanized and destroy one another, as in Nature where the older is devoured by the newer.” (Heckert, Virginia) Bernd and Hilla Becher's works are shown as a group to establish a “ movement itself from image to image to image aimed to be the story more than did the sum of the collected parts, regardless of whether it is the movement of the photographer himself or herself, or the camera, or the movement of our own eye as it skips from one photograph to the next.” (Heckert, Virginia). The Becher's wanted to focus on what the images provide to the viewer when viewed together, e. g. an anatomy of the relations between constituent parts. Bernd and Hilla Becher's background with Germany and the inspirations from works of August Sander and company. Concepts such as ‘New Objectivity.’ Carrying forward Bernd and Hilla Becher's work is the machine age photographers, albeit complexly. Some describe it as “industrial archaeology” or “a contribution to the social history of industrial work.” Some criticisms of the concept, that those assumptions are misleading. The photographs were captured during overcast skies early in the morning, to remove shadows and convey as many details as possible. When displayed, the images are often grouped in a grid pattern by subject or as diptychs.

In response to a post war Germanic period, Becher's "subjective photography" tries to humanize, naturalize, and synthesize Germany's history and idealization within the industrialized comportment. The Machine Age brought a visual pace that was "ever accelerating, ever expanding" and highly juxtaposed to the past, more subdued, Germanic lifestyle. Becher sought to capture the underlying function and organization of this new ideal by ultimately picturing these differences in industrialization. Becher's work is often said to be continuous in that each photograph cannot stand on its own; Becher's work is a body of work and a thematic response in framing the political, enlightening, and responsive post war Germany. Becher's work was innovative in that, by capturing the post war, she has ultimately defined Germany before mass industry and by the idealized past. Stimson, from Tate Paper, writes "by shooting the grand icons of the Machine Age 'straight on' so they do not, they have claimed 'hide or exaggerate or depict anything in an untrue fashion', by committing themselves to an ethic of representation free of bogus political elevation or degradation, they realize one leg of their generation's postmodern affect". 2014: Kulturpreis der Sparkassen Kulturstiftung Rheinland, sponsored by the Sparkassen Kulturstiftung Rheinland, awarded to Hilla Becher.