
No contemporary artists have had a more profound effect on the way we depict buildings than Bernd and Hilla Becher. The husband-and-wife team began photographing industrial buildings in their native Germany back in the 1960s, framing each individual grain elevator, gas tank, or water tower like a human portrait and grouping the black-and-white images according to their formal and typological similarities. The photos’ simple power and the couple’s leadership at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf inspired a school of photography, which includes Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer. Bernd died in 2007, Hilla last month, on Oct. 10.

