Bernd and Hilla Becher were extraordinary photographers and equally extraordinary mentors.Their black-and-white photographs of the industrial monoliths of the Ruhr Valley - cooling towers, mines, power stations, lime kilns - were always taken under monochrome skies so as to minimise shadows and emphasised the man-made structures’ leaden, sculptural presence. This full face, unromantic approach was an updated version of the New Objectivity style of the 1920s and 1930s.When Bernd Becher was appointed professor of photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1976 the husband-and-wife’s style and documentary method (they displayed their photographs in groups, like stamp collectors) was brought to bear on a generation of highly talented photographers.Becher’s pupils included Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Elger Esser, Candida Höfer and Axel Hütte, members of what came to be called the Dusseldorf School of photography. This influential group’s work is the subject of an exhibition at Ben Brown Fine Art at 12 Brook’s Mews in London.Not all of the photographers show the Bechers’ clear-eyed objectivity (the landscapes of Elger Esser, for example, have a 19th-century painterly feel) but what they have in common is an interest in the traces left by man.More often than not, man is an out-of-frame presence in the pictures, the missing makers and inhabitants of buildings that seem inexplicably abandoned. When people are present, as in Gursky’s photographs of crowds, each individual is more of a pixel than an autonomous being, while in Struth’s pictures of museum interiors the visitors are static exhibits in the way the real ones are too.Where Becher’s pupils also differ from his practice is in the size of their works; most of them have used new digital technology to print at a large scale which makes their work more immersive than taxonomic. The result is disconcerting: with the Bechers’ photographs the viewer is in control, with the pupils’, however, the pictures threaten to consume whoever stands in front of them. Dusseldorf Photography: Bernd & Hilla Becher and Beyond is at Ben Brown Fine Arts from Sept. 4 through Oct. 3 2015
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