For over forty years, German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher have photographed water 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 has begun to disappear in the transition from an industrial 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 ensure that the motifs they photograph are rendered with a high degree of precision and clarity.
The Bechers organize the images into groupings assembled in a grid, classified by function into types. In this strict layout, each structure may easily be compared with the others. The nine separate pictures in Water Towers together transform the specificity of the individual towers into a variation on an ideal form and, conversely, preserve their individual characteristics within a typology.
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights since 1980, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, p. 75.
Explore 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.