For more than forty years, the Bechers photographed winding towers, blast furnaces, silos, cooling towers, gas tanks, grain elevators, oil refineries, and the like—all examples of the European and American industrial architecture that had begun to disappear in the transition from an industrial society to an information society. Their works typically present each structure frontally against flat, evenly gray backgrounds. By using large-format cameras and finely grained black-and-white film, they ensured that the motifs they photographed were rendered with a high degree of precision and clarity.
The Bechers organized the images into groupings assembled in grids, classified by function into types. In this strict layout, each structure may easily be compared with the others. The nine separate pictures in Winding Towers together transform the specificity of the individual towers into variations on an ideal form and, conversely, preserve their individual characteristics within a typology.
MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)
Gallery label from Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New , December 21, 2013–April 21, 2014.
In 1957, Bernd Becher began taking photographs of industrial buildings in West Germany. The same year, he met Hilla Wobeser, who had also spent time photographing the country's industrial regions. Knowing that much of the infrastructure of these areas would not survive the impending collapse of Germany’s coal and steel markets, they set out to document the buildings and machines of a disappearing economy. Winding Towers exemplifies their approach: the metal structures (which maneuver equipment into the mine shafts below) are framed in a uniform manner, with no workers in sight. As Bernd once commented, “the winding towers . . . look very similar, and you could think that they came from a production series, like cars. Only when you put them beside each other do you see their individuality.” The Bechers' first solo gallery exhibition in North America was held in 1972 at Sonnabend Gallery and included several groups of winding towers as well as photographs of water towers, silos, and gas storage tanks.
Explore more
Built environment
The spaces that human design and actions have shaped. These include infrastructural systems like electricity grids or highway networks, cities, buildings and other structures, landscaped areas, and resource-extraction sites like mines or oil wells.
Learn more →
From MoMA Design Store
Installation views
We have identified this work in the following photos from our exhibition history.
Licensing
Artwork or archival images
If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA's collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).
Audio and film clips
MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit Circulating Film and Video Library.
Text from a publication or the archives
If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA's archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].
Feedback
This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please fill out this feedback form.