Gift of John Andrew MacMahon '95

Bernd and Hilla Becher were conceptual artists and photographers who worked collaboratively. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures and referred to these constructions as “anonymous sculptures.” They photographed winding towers, blast furnaces, industrial facades, gas tanks, cooling towers, mine heads, preparation plants, lime kilns, grain elevators, water towers, gravel plants, coal bunkers, and sometimes framework houses, once traditional German working-class homes. Their documentation of these structures took them from the Ruhr valley region in Germany to England, Wales, France, the United States, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The resulting austere, black and white photographs were organized into a grid or horizontal line showing multiple angles in an attempt to experience the subject in the round as opposed to a single vantage point.

Dr. Ann Fox’s “Disability in Literature & Art” class wrote and recorded image descriptions of some of the works in the Van Every/Smith collection. Here one student gives a description of the work through their perspective: Ella Dittmer ’26.