ANONYMOUS SCULPTURE
BERND BECHER, HILLA BECHER, 1970
Anonymous Sculpture, a very classy title for industrial structures photographed by people with almost no interest in charming you. The light is flat, the distance is fixed, the camera is dead-on. No drama. No moody sky. No heroic angle trying to make a water tower look like Napoleon. Just: here it is. And here's another one. And another one. Bernd and Hilla Becher spent decades photographing water towers, blast furnaces, winding towers, heavy industrial infrastructure, with the same stiff, unblinking consistency. Which is a pretty unusual way to spend a life. Because who stands in front of factories for thirty years saying: little to the left, less sky, perfect, now do it again? The Bechers, that's who. And then, at the Venice Biennale, they won the Golden Lion for sculpture. Not photography. Sculpture. Which sounds odd until you look for more than thirty seconds. Because the title is not a metaphor. At first they look the same. Then they don't. This one is squat. This one is narrow. And because the pictures are so controlled, the differences start doing all the talking. Sameness is not the same thing as similarity. That's the trick. The Bechers make you feel it without raising their voice even a little. Just the object, standing there. And somehow, the more neutral they are, the stranger the towers get. They stop being industrial stuff and start becoming characters. Almost portraits. Which is funny, because these were never meant to be looked at like this. They were useful things. Infrastructure. Built to do a job and eventually disappear. A lot of them did. So without changing tone, the photographs become elegies. No crying. No speech. Just: this existed. Look carefully. And yes, half of contemporary photography is still basically living off this move. The grid, the archive, the deadpan style, the whole art-of-looking-like-you're-not-making-art thing. But forget the influence for a second. The real pleasure is smaller and weirder. They make you stare at something nobody was asking you to stare at until it reveals a personality it was never supposed to have. A water tower becomes a type. Then an individual. Then a relic. And by the end, the title stops sounding clever. Anonymous Sculpture. Exactly. Sculpture, without permission.