New York/MoMA

Photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher at MoMA (digital)

I went to the Museum of Modern Art yesterday to see Home Delivery, the exhibit on pre-fabricated housing, but along the way, cruised through the photography galleries. I was dismayed to see yet another major Bernd and Hilla Becher exhibition, at least at first. Don't misunderstand, I have always greatly admired their work and appreciated the dogged passion underneath their coolly conceptual approach to architecture and landscape. Sadly, Bernd Becher died last year.

But no artists I can think of have been more overexposed in the past decade or so than the Bechers. Not only is their work featured in virtually every survey of recent photography, we are reminded constantly of all the photographers who have been influenced by them as teachers, notably the Germans Gursky, Ruff, and Struth. All worthy artists, I am particularly fond of Thomas Struth's pictures. I just think it's time for curators to move on.

As I walked through the Becher exhibit, however, I found myself recalling why I like their work--despite its ubiquity--and was very happy to see two walls of images less rigorously centered on a particular building type where the landscape surrounding their objects of single-minded observation is allowed a greater role. There were two series, one which dealt with steel mills with the blast furnaces and attendant structures arrayed against the horizon.


Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Walker Evans (1935)

One scene in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania looked familiar--and then it flashed in my head. The same cemetery, row of houses, and distant factory were photographed in the 1930s by Walker Evans. The Bechers were undoubtedly aware of the quotation, and I was pleased to see them acknowledge this connection to photographic history and to one of the icons of landscape/documentary photography.

But enough about the Bechers.