The Infrastructure of Memory: Bernd and Hilla Becher's Historical Forms

ABSTRACT: During their nearly fifty-year career (1959–2007), Bernd and Hilla Becher created an unprecedented black-and-white photographic archive of the transnational architecture of industrial capitalism: blast furnaces, coal bunkers, coal tipples, cooling towers, gasometers, gravel plants, grain elevators, lime kilns, winding towers, and more. The husband-and-wife team displayed these "ugly objects" across more than a dozen books and exhibited them in the rarefied galleries of the world's leading museums. The interpretative challenge that the Bechers' photography presents is its rigorously objective, depsychologized, dehistoricized, and antihumanistic perspective, which they maintained without exception across almost a half-century of work. This article analyzes the aesthetic neutrality of the Bechers' style to draw out the politics and ideology of their formalism. In doing so, its aim is to return history to these photographs, not just by building a historical scaffolding around them but also by bringing to the surface the history that is immanent within the formal choices that the Bechers consistently made. The article's argument parses the complex relationship the Bechers' images have to how capital organizes and structures time and how their oeuvre both reinforces and resists capital's teleological narratives of progress and development.