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bernd + hilla becher

20 october - 3rd january 2005centre pompidou, parishttp://www.centrepompidou.fr

---blast furnaces, cooling towers, gasometers, water towers,lime kilns, compressors, factory halls, head-framesof mine shafts - not the stuff of excitement for most of us.however these anonymous industrial structures havebeen a fountain of passion for the german spouses becherwho have avidly photographed them for over 40 years.

their black-and-white images are all taken in the sameclinical manner: a front and profile angle provide a clearand objective documentation of each structure,the building is placed in the centre of the frameand isolated from its environment. the mass of photos aremade coherent through categorisation into typologies,revealing the vast diversity of objects all with the samepurpose. non-identical, yet uniform -the idiosyncratic differences and similarities becomefascinating.

the bechers describe their subjects as'buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style.'presented collectively, their images transform these buildingsinto objects worthy of interest, if not admiration.

the typological approach to photography has historicas well as aesthetic significance. we turn to photographybecause it is a rich means through which to represent -and interpret, reality - and the documentary aspect to thebechers work has been widely appreciated by engineeringand architectural historians.

---timethe objective direction of their work was an unusual choiceas after the two world wars, documentary style had becomeimpossible. it was of good taste for german artists toignore history.

however the bechers had some precedents, for examplein fellow german photographer august sander,who over the period of forty years took portraits of thousands

of german citizens. the idea of 'the archive as art' wasproposed by his oeuvre. he arranged these portraits according

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to social type and occupation - from peasant farmers tocircus performers, to prosperous businessmen.

---bernd and hilla becherbegan taking portraits of modern industrial buildings in oldfactory sites in 1959.

bernd becherwas born in 1931, in siegen, germany,studied painting and lithography and later, typography.

hilla (wobese) becher)wasborn in 1934, in potsdam, germany.she studied painting at the kunstakademie dsseldorf,where she met bernd becher.

the two artists first collaborated in 1959 and they marriedin 1961. they began working as freelance photographers,concentrating on industrial photography.in 1991, the artists won the leone doro award for sculptureat the venice biennale. this was possible because in 1969,the artists had called the architectural subject matter of theirphotographs, anonymous sculpture.

Bernd and Hilla Becherfirst began their still-ongoing project ofsystematically photographing industrial structures water towers, blastfurnaces, gas tanks, mine heads, grain elevators and the likein thelate 1950s.1 The seemingly objective and scientific character of theirproject was in part a polemical return to the 'straight' aesthetics andsocial themes of the 1920s and 1930s in response to the gooey andsentimental subjectivist photographic aesthetics that arose in the earlypost-war period. This latter position was epitomised in Germany by theentrepreneurial, beauty-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder humanism of OttoSteinert's subjektive fotografie '"Subjective photography",' wroteSteinert in his founding manifesto, 'means humanised, individualisedphotography' and globally by the one-world humanism of The Familyof Man. 2 While many photographers followedRobert Frank's criticalrejoinder and depicted the seamier, chauvinistic underbelly of thesyrupy universalisms advocated for by Steichen and Steinert, theBechers simply rejected it and returned to an older, pre-war paradigm(fig.1).

That they were responding critically does not mean, however, that theBechers were not working at the same crossroads between man and

machine that had differently concerned Steichen, Steinert, Frank andmany others at the time. 'The idea,' they said once, 'is to make families

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of objects,' or, on another occasion, 'to create families of motifs objects or motifs, that is, they continued, 'that become humanised anddestroy one another, as in Nature where the older is devoured by the3newer.' Their brute oedipal definition of the family form aside, this is notso different from the relations established between Steichen's motifslovers, childbirth, mothers and children, children playing, disturbedchildren, fathers and sons, etc., etc. nor, for that matter, is it all thatdifferent from the narrative relations established by Frank shooting fromthe hip as he did fleeing from one roadside encounter to another, fromone flag or jukebox or political rally or civic parade to another andanother and another.

Like these predecessors, the Bechers have been concerned from thebeginning more with what Kevin Lynch called 'a pattern of sequentialexperiences,' that is with a process that connects one image or one

encounter or one object to the next and the next and the next ('as inNature,' they say), rather than using photography to exercise theanalytical powers of isolation, definition and classification or evendetailed description and understanding. 4 As much as we might wantthem to be, the photographs are not illustrations,' notes one observerflatly, but instead render their subject 'by means of the network ofphotographs;' when the images are viewed together they provide, hecontinued, 'an anatomy lesson,' that is an account of the relationsbetween constituent parts.5 Or, putting this idea of network or system orseries or sequence in more historical terms, a more critical observerwrote of their project: 'The Bechers are interested in the characterimplicit in a faade, just the way Sander was in the character implicit ina face,' but then adds, indicating the crossroads we have already begunto consider here, 'I cannot help regarding these pictures as macabremonuments to human self-distortion in the name of social reason all-too-human structures that are ridiculously social.' 6 It is only in viewingthese structures in the serial form given by the Bechers that both the'all-too-human' character, or the particularity of each, and the'ridiculously social' conformity to their archival schema is revealed.Working objectivity against subjectivity, one comportment against theother and then back again, the Bechers have found the motor for theirepic in an elastic liminal bearing that continually bounds between sides,between a cool, quasi-disembodied objectivity and a hot subjectivecomportment that speaks of its own history and desire in its bearingtoward the world.

That said, their project did draw its original vitality from two prewarinfluences, and both would seem to locate their ambition elsewherethat is, strictly on the side of what was once called the New Objectivitywith nothing in common with the postwar subjectivist enterprises of

Steichen or Steinert or Frank. The first of these prewar influences wasthe systematic, pseudo-scientific studies of Karl Blossfeldt, Albert

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Renger-Patzsch, and, particularly, August Sander whose life-projectmaking sociological portraits of Germans from all classes andoccupations provided the methodological and affective structure for theBechers own typological procedure and a logical alternative to theaffective load given alternately in the sentimental identification andscornful disidentification adopted by their humanist predecessors. Thesecond major influence, the source for the distinctive subject matterthey chose to apply Sander's system to, was the industrial iconographypopular with many photographers and artists in the 1920s and 1930s.They might have had in mind one of the many well-known photographsby Renger-Patzsch, such as his Intersecting Braces of a Truss Bridgefrom 1928, for example, but it could have just as well been photographyby Charles Sheeler or Margaret Bourke-White orLszl Moholy-Nagyor many, many others equally and less well known.

Just to recall a key influence from a history that is well known to anystudent of the Bechers, scientific method, industrial subject matter andthe mechanical advantage of photography to varying degrees amongtheir Machine Age forebears from around the industrialised world andacross the political spectrum all drew on and supported a challenge tothe perceived anachronism of aestheticism and subjectivism andpromised a new place and new importance for artists in the modernworld. That ambition was developed in many places for example byAleksandr Rodchenko in 1928 when he wrote: 'Art has no place inmodern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for theromantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies anddeceptions . Every modern cultured man must make war against art asagainst opium.' The antidote to such decadent self-deception and weak-willed addiction, he concluded in a rather overwrought directive, was assimple as it was modern: 'Photograph and be photographed!' 7 Not allmembers of the once-labelled 'engineer generation' were as antipatheticto the older ideals as Rodchenko (Renger-Patzsch, for one, soughtsomething more like reconciliation between modern life and art and sethimself against such modernist polemics particularly as they weredeveloped in Germany by Moholy-Nagy) but all did share in the claimfor photography's machine-age advantage, responsibility andentitlement.8 All agreed that representation needed to be mechanical ifit was to be modern, all agreed that art needed to be somehow sober,objective, sachlich, at a remove from any simple expressiveness untoitself and at a remove from any claim that the art object might be abearer of value in and of itself.

More broadly still, of course, this tension between art as an autonomousand self-contained value, on the one hand, and modern life, on theother, has regularly given definition and distinction to the social role

played by photography throughout its history. From the beginning,photography was not only a passive product or sign or symptom of

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modernity but also worked actively as an engine of modernisation.Beginning already with its official, state-sponsored birth in 1839 bothcivic duty and marketplace opportunity alike were pinned to its capacityfor bringing vision as an ideal and visual representation as a materialresource into the workaday world of the masses, for bringing visualimagination up to speed with the ever-accelerating, ever-expandingindustrial revolution and thereby modernizing the archaic, pseudo-religious, would-be aristocratic presumption of art in its new role asherald of the private life of the bourgeois subject.

This mantle trumpeted by the Machine Age photographers and regularlyassumed by photography generally is carried forward in the Becherswork, albeit complexly. While their career has been almost exclusively afunction of the international art market and art publishing industry andthe German art education system, their photographic studies regularly

have been characterised asindustrial archaeology' or 'a contribution tothe social history of industrial work' and are routinely assumed tosupport such extra-artistic ambitions and accomplishments. Theseassumptions are misleading, however: their photographs offer littlesocial-historical or archaeological interpretation and they do not detailthe particulars of design, operation and social function that might beuseful for such areas of study.9 They are completely upfront about this:'Things which can be interesting for technical historians, certainmachines for example, are not visually interesting for us.'10 Indeed,they often go to great lengths to ensure the absence of the sort of detailthat would be of interest to technical historians or social historians orhistorians of any sort really: 'We want to offer the audience a point ofview, or rather a grammar, to understand and compare the differentstructures,' they have said, 'Through photography, we try to arrangethese shapes and render them comparable. To do so, the objects mustbe isolated from their context and freed from all association.'11 Whenthey have tried collaborating with historians, for example, it hasn'tworked out at all: 'They wanted to write a text, and garnish their textwith our photos,' complained Bernd about their experimentation withsuch a role in the late 1960s. 'They couldn't imagine that photographscould stand on their own. They wanted to give it a scientific basis,'objected Hilla. 'It was quite dreadful,' continued Bernd. 'It was a badexperience,' Hilla agreed, 'Working with them, we felt for the first timethat we weren't free.'12

They do employ a method, like much historical or archaeologicalanalysis, that is strict in its consistency and pure in its sense of purposebut that purpose avoidscontext' and 'association' by design and thushas little to offer understanding in the manner traditionally given by suchextra-artistic, analytically-minded aims that are the province of

historians and archaeologists. Their more properly artisticcharacterisations of the structures they photograph 'anonymous

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sculptures,' as they termed it in 1969, for example, and 'basic forms or'Grundformen,' in 1999 suggest a more useful understanding of theirproject by drawing us away from the simpler, more transparent notion ofrepresentation assumed in such archaeological and social historicalcharacterisations and throwing us into the murkier waters of theaesthetic.

architects of Tate Modern 2000 DACS, 2002 View in Tate CollectionThe Bechers have emerged as a leading influence in postwar arthistory, not only for their own work and its interweaving with otherartistic developments such as Minimalism and Conceptual Art, but also,particularly in the last decade, for the extension of their project by astring of extraordinarily successful students. (see fig.2) 13 Indeed, the'point of view' or 'grammar' developed by the Bechers has gained a

significant measure of dominance within contemporary art practice. Myeffort here will be to read that 'grammar' as embodied expression, as aform of 'comportment' or bearing toward the world, and as such as asign or symptom of a social relation. The distinctive orientation anddetermination of that photographic body language or photographiccomportment, which in the Becher scholarship is sometimes said to befound midway 'between distance and proximity,' has taken on imposingproportions in the epic continuity of their own work and in the stilledgrandeur seemingly discovered anew by their students again and againand again in settings ranging from the properly grand all the way down

the food chain of discrimination to the properly banal. Indeed,comporting oneself to see the world in this way to see it grandlywithout caring about that grandeur may be said to be their legacy. 'Mr.Struth operates from a chilly peak, where the air is thin,' writes one criticabout the best known of the Becher students. 'Standing before thephotographs of museums and churches and mobs of tourists, we canbecome absorbed by the chaos of culture, sacred places made profane.In the forest, we acquiesce to the spiritual pleasure of solitude. We turninward, breathing slowly.'14

Considering the strong debt of this comportment to various artisticdevelopments of the 1920s and 1930s, its powerfully disciplinedelaboration as a form by the Bechers themselves in the 1950s and1960s and its artworld success in the work of their students in 1980sand 1990s, I shall be asking how it has been able to, 'at a stroke,' in thewords of one philosopher of comportment, 'incorporate the past into thepresent and weld that present to a future.'15 Such an inquiry, it can besaid, is the task of the historian generally, or perhaps it should be thatis, 'not to moralizse about remembering and forgetting' this is AnsonRabinbach writing about the question of postwar Germans coming to

terms with their recent history in order to consider historical methodmore broadly 'but to identify the ways that certain metaphoric pasts

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can be cathected to contemporary events.'16 The Bechers have takenup a particular past and rearticulated it with a new and different force inthe present; they have, as Rabinbach puts it, cathected a politically andmorally charged myth of the past to contemporary events. Framing theproblem more narrowly around photography, we can ask how theBechers have conveyed its Enlightenment promise of rigor andtransparency and progress, its grand bid to 'make war against art asagainst opium,' as Rodchenko put it, into the present. One answer tothis question that we need to consider in order to get at thecharacteristic bearing in their work and the legacy of that bearing in thework of their students is whether the Enlightenment promise longassumed to be the distinctive charter of photography has been invertedor returned to its homeland category of art, that is, to the same categoryit had originally taken as its adversary or other.

In order to flesh out the details of this bearing or comportment I shall beworking between three separate attitudes that each can be said to bedriving the Becher project: commitmentor faithfulness to a project orposition, first of all, delightor simple pleasure taken in the world,secondly, and then, third, enlightenmentor the appeal to a universalhuman standard such as reason. Each of these attitudes orperspectives is given its own section in what follows but the goal in theend will be to bring all three together into a common understanding ofthe conviction or pleasure or truth that endows their work with itsforceful and compelling sense of purpose.

Commitment

The most obvious feature of the Bechers project is its disciplinedcommitment to a singular vision a commitment that has beenconsistent over nearly half a century's duration, consistent across manydifferent countries and regions, and consistent from each to the next ofmany thousands of photographs. As one critic has put it, the pattern of'rhythms and repetitions established between the individual pictures(and, we might add, between individual series as well) isvery much the

idea of the work.'17 Such, the artists have admitted, is their goal 'toproduce a more or less perfect chain of different forms and shapes and, indeed, something like thisperfect chain' or pattern of serialrhythms and repetitions is the initial impression given to the beholderwhen facing a Becher installation or book for the first time or whenmoving from one to the next of any of their twelve books from WaterTowersto Framework Housesto Gas Tanksto Industrial Landscapes,for example or in and between any of the numerable exhibitioncatalogues.18

Their system is based on a rigorous set of procedural rules: astandardised format and ratio of figure to ground, a uniformly level, full-

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frontal view, near-identical flat lighting conditions or the approximationof such conditions in the photographic processing, a consistent lack ofhuman presence, a consistent use of the restricted chromatic spectrumoffered by black and white photography rather than the broad rangegiven by colour, precise uniformity in print quality, sizing, framing andpresentation, and a shared function for all the structures photographedfor a given series. There is another obvious rule too, although one theirproject might be said to systematically ignore their industrial history isexclusively and resolutely a history of the west. We need make only themost rudimentary comparisons to see that theirs is a project aboutmodernisation not globalisation and so does not detail, or even alludeto, the geopolitical ambitions and conflicts that drive the process.19(fig.3) They do not, for example, group the images by geographic orhistorical categories, which would bring a more detailed historicalconsciousness to bear on the material at hand, nor do they depict or,generally, otherwise consider the workers and others involved with thestructures they represent, nor, even, do they arrange the pictures in amanner that would chronicle the development of their project. The termthey generally use to describe their method istypological' and theyfreely state that it hasmuch to do with the 19th century,' that is, theysay, with 'the encyclopaedic approach' used, for example, in botany orzoology or, we might add, psychology and criminology.20 Indeed, wemight say more broadly, their system is based precisely on the principleof the archiveits dry compartmentalisation', as Allan Sekula has put it

that so concerned Michel Foucault.Fig.3Hai ZhouBeijing China, 1997This photograph shows an outlet for flushing waste materialsfrom an iron-smelting furnace at the Capital Steel factory, Beijing. Three workers, migrants from ruralareas, are retrieving waste iron using a magnet on the end of a bamboo pole. None is employed as afull-time member of staff at this factory.

While an individual Becher photograph seen on its own withoutattribution could be mistaken easily as the sort of transparent illustrationused in trade journals or annual reports, for example, or in books on thehistory or design of industrial architecture, the same photograph seen inits intended setting alongside tens or hundreds of nearly identical others

could not support any similar instrumental goal. While it is true that itisonly through their participation in a system of presentation, under themodel of the archive, that the single images gain a significance which islarger than their particular instances,' as one observer puts it, the kindof significance given by this systematisation is different.21 Unlike similarapproaches used in botany or zoology, for example, the cumulativeeffect of the typological method as it is applied in the Bechers life-project does not provide greater knowledge of the processes or historyof their subject. Instead, the use of rhythm and repetition endows thebuildings they photograph with the 'anonymity' or abstract form they

seek rather than with scientific specificity (by divorcing meaning fromoriginal purpose and everyday social function) and, in turn, allows us to

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read them ahistorically and extra-socially and appreciate them asautonomous aesthetic objects or 'sculpture.'

This distinctive method of cultivating aesthetic response is consistentwith the 1920s and 1930s project of aesthetic appropriation of scientific

or systemic method, but it is also different. Perhaps the most significantmeasure of difference between the Bechers and their forebears isartistic ambition. I am going to briefly review the well-known aimscirculating through much of the prewar work to establish a backdrop formy discussion of how the Bechers have helped to both uphold andtransform that heritage.

At those moments when it was most full of itself, the 'New Vision' (as itwas called in the pre-eminent artistic slogan of the day) was to renderintelligible and help propagate a new social order based on mass

production, mass politics and mass media. This mission offered artists asense of social significance that the profession had not enjoyed since itsdays in the court. Suddenly, as one memoirist has recounted in aconventional piece of critical wisdom from the period, 'the artist wasdeprived not of his social acceptance but of his isolation. This socialisolation had been a by-product of the Industrial Revolution, as typicaland pernicious as slums, mechanisation and unemployment. .Montmartre, Schwabing, Bloomsbury, and Greenwich Village wereexpressions as typical of nineteenth-century mentality as Wall Street,Lloyds of London, La Bourse, and Das kaiserliche Berlin.'22 At its

grandest, artists of the industrializing world in the 1920s and 1930sbelieved that by taking up photography as a medium, industry as atheme, and science as a method they were abandoning the bohemianghettos and would, once again, occupy positions at the centre of sociallife by working as designers and propagandists for the emergingpolitical class.

What gave artists renewed confidence and ambition was a newunderstanding of patronage that had been made possible by therevolutions of the 1910s. Instead of decorating the private mansions of

individual bankers or businessmen, artists were hired by revolutionarygovernments in Russia and Mexico and patronised by communistparties in much of the rest of the industrialised world to make art thatspoke about and addressed itself to the working masses. This visiontook root in the 1920s with artists fancying themselves as Tayloristengineers or planners and was gradually retooled by the 1930s forduties on the other side of the labour/management divide as artistscame to see themselves in the figure of the industrial worker. This newsense of significance and anticipation of an emerging audience andmarket quickly impressed itself upon most of the developing movements

of the period regardless of whether the political conditions existed toactually support such ambition. At the heart of this transformed self-

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consciousness was the assumption that the world was being remadethrough mass production and mass politics and artists, as the engineersand labourers of visual form, were to be key players developing themass culture that would drive both fronts of modernisation.

A rich sense of this anticipated social role was given in a series ofstatements by the Russian-born, Berlin-trained, New York-based,Precisionist-turned-Social Realist Louis Lozowick on the changingstatus of the artist in the Soviet Union. 'To say that art has beenencouraged in the Soviet Union is to make a true but tame statementabout the actual situation,' he reported in 1936 to his peers at the First

American Artists Congress in New York. 'Of course art has beenencouraged,' he continued. 'Artists are considered part of the vast armyof workers, physical and mental and as such an indispensable factor inthe socialist reconstruction of the country. Full members in trade unions,

the artists carry insurance against sickness, accident andunemployment. They are consulted on every issue that vitally affectsthe country. When we read, for example, of such vast projects as theten year plan for the complete rebuilding of Moscow, the most giganticscheme of city planning in history, we are not surprised to find artistsactively cooperating.'23

Still today the Bechers work (and its legacy in the art of their successfulstudents) makes reference to this phantasm from the prewar past.Unlike their artist-cum-engineer-cum-worker predecessors, however,

the Bechers sensibility relies on melancholy rather than innovation orallegiance to make its point: tied to the loss of an idealised past, theirwork gains its emotional power, its expressive force as art, from theextent to which it conveys that sense of loss to the beholder. Theirphotographs present us with a transformed image of the avant-gardeambitions of the 1920s and 1930s: in their view, the great industrialstructures that served as monuments to the 'gigantic schemes ofcollective life, monuments to technological, social and politicalmodernisation, have aged and are now empty of all but memory of theambition they once housed. Likewise, their postwar rehashing of the

'New Vision' is now drained of all but memory of the heroic affect thatwent along with artists sense of their own 'indispensable' contribution.They have stated their position outright: 'We don't agree with thedepiction of buildings in the 20s and 1930s. Things were seen eitherfrom above or below which tended to monumentalise the object. Thiswas exploited in terms of a socialistic view a fresh view of the world, anew man, a new beginning.'24

This postwar critique of the New Vision and related artistic ambitions ofthe prewar past is generally consistent across an entire generation of

artists and intellectuals whose historically distinct form of criticalitycontinues to serve as a foundation for the range of critical perspectives

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available to us today. We do not have to go far for such testimonywitness, for example, Michel Foucault in one of his most-cited essays:we 'know from experience,' he writes, 'that the claim to escape from thesystem of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs ofanother society, of another way of thinking, another culture, anothervision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangeroustraditions . . . to the programs for a new man that the worst politicalsystems have repeated throughout the twentieth century.'25 TheBechers, like many of their contemporaries, have made an obsession ofthis disagreement with the past. By returning to those views again andagain and again for nearly half a century with even greater sobriety,even greater assiduousness, even greater industry than the NeueSachlichkeitthat inspired them, by shooting the grand icons of theMachine Age 'straight-on' so they do not, they have claimed, 'hide orexaggerate or depict anything in an untrue fashion,' by committingthemselves to an ethic of representation free of bogus political elevationor degradation, they realise one leg of their generation's postmodernaffect.26In so doing, the Bechers commitment sits wedged between apassionate, trance-like fascination with the great progressivedemocratic ambitions of modernism and an equally ardent renunciation.

Such is the Bechers burden, their ethic: a dogmatic commitment to aform of representation that is somehow free of ideology, free of a'socialistic view' or the view of any other doctrine or ism. Butcommitment is really only one part of what is given by their strong senseof order, by the 'rhythms and repetitions that form their project and sonow we turn to the second part, that is, to the evident delight taken bytheir work in the play of form.

Delight

The promise of the aesthetic as a realm of experience separate fromthe instrumental thinking of daily life has served many differentpurposes over the years since it was first elaborated by theEnlightenment philosophers. It has given rise, for example, to the ideal

of 'publicness in German, ffentlichkeit or a public sphere of proto-political discourse independent of undue influence from church, stateand, later, the marketplace. 'It provided the training ground for criticalpublic reflection' is how Habermas once described it; art and theexperience it provided were 'claimed as a serviceable topic ofdiscussion through which a [newly] publicly-oriented subjectivitycommunicated with itself' rather than achieving its political being only 'inthe service of a patron.'27 So too, the aesthetic has long given rise tothe contrary ideal of a bohemian preserve where a delicately cultivatedaristocratic balance of taste and tastelessness, convention and

transgression, suffers the brute indifference and smug naivet of itsbourgeois audience.

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The Bechers transformation of the iconography and methodology ofsocial ambition from the 1920s and 1930s into 'anonymous sculpturesrelies just as much as their forebears on this counterpoint betweenaesthetic and instrumental world views, but they do so oppositely.Theirs is no war against the opiate of the elite, as Rodchenko hadadvocated. They have made themselves and their audience intoconnoisseurs of an industrial past providing us all with opportunity forunexpected visual delectation, with opportunity to delight in the play offine distinctions and subtle variations between the appearances of manydifferent structures that all perform the same instrumental function. 28They offer their audience the opportunity, as one viewer has testified,for example, to delight in 'differences in composition, rhythm and formalsolutions where an ordinarily distracted eye would see only indifferenceand standardisation.' 'I love Bernd and Hilla Becher's work,' he says,'this is genuinely great art, the kind that has no need to have its nameprotected by being placed in a museum, because it already belongs toour collective memory.'29 Collectively, in other words, there workconstitutes a masterpiece. In the words of another viewer, the Becherswork is said to allow usto regard a single line of rivets as equallysignificant a marking as a full-blown mannerist conceit.'30 In so doing,they revitalise the claims of taste and tastelessness by exercising thoseclaims on the turf of instrumental reason, that is, by making art out ofindustry.

One interpretation of their contribution, one that has deep roots inmodernist critical theory, might argue that such connoisseurshiprepresents nothing more than the aestheticisation of politics, nothingmore than the transformation of a publicly oriented sensibility into ararefied product aimed at an elite market that ambivalently andobsessively draws succor from an earlier, more political moment for itslegitimation. 'Their work is a fraud,' a certain school of critic might oncehave alleged, 'a mere neo-avantgarde.' Andreas Huyssen, for example,has made a broader statement that might be torn from its originalcircumstance and retrofitted to this concern, particularly if we grant theBechers nothing more than their disaffected pastiche of the past: 'Theobsessive attempts to give utopia a bad name,' he writes, 'remainfundamentally ideological and locked in a discursive battle with residualand emerging utopian thinking in the here and now.'31 Another, moreopenhanded interpretation, however, might see that same act ofaestheticisation as in its own way liberating, as both cathartic andinvigorating, as an attempt to serve equally two pressing andcontradictory concerns: to both remember and let go of a failed politicalprogram and failed attempt to upgrade artists social status in the nameof the possibility for other, more viable investments. As such, theunexpected finery afforded by the Bechers, the part of their work thatdeclares itself to be art in the most conventional decorative or

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ornamental sense, the systemic delight in the play of form, might well bevalued (even, perhaps, by that group one critic has labelled 'the lastpartisans of the avant-garde') as something more than mere decadenceor self-indulgence or anti-utopianism: that is, as a refuge from politicalcynicism for an age in which such refuge is often unavailable.32

This question about the place of the aesthetic in the Bechers work canalso be phrased in more general terms: how is it that we move beyondthe critical negation of failed political attachments from the past? Howcan old commitments the old 'socialistic views,' for example berendered sympathetic beyond their inadequacy, heroic beyond theirfailing, forward looking beyond their obsolescence, cherished beyondnot being believed?33 The issue here thus is one of political memory, ofa 'talking cure' for false consciousness, of how the political past isnegotiated within our sense of the present and how that settlement

inhabits the realm of the aesthetic. In light of such a question, theBechers mastery of their craft and the obsessiveness of theirfascination their tight, standardised formal rigor and their fixedcommitment to a gruelling, life-long study might be prized precisely forthe way the aesthetic appeal of its form can serve to dislodge an earlierpolitical ideal from its place under the weight of protracted repressionand anxiety in the present in order to be re-seated in a position ofsimpler, less-freighted distinction in the past. The distinguishing beautyof their work, thus, would not be found in the way it shares our period'sstill-vital critical distance from the old utopianisms, the old 'programs fora new man' and the like at least not on its own but instead in itsseemingly indefatigable preservationist impulse, in its attempt to hold onto and find delight in the great beleaguered promise of the modernistpast over and above the critique of that past that is still vital in thepresent.

It is the fantasy life of this work, its capacity to take delight in an openingin the past that leads forward into the future, then, that might be said tohave sustained it and driven its rhythm and repetition onwards,maintaining its commitment to producing nearly the same picture over

and over and over again for almost half a century. Bernd Becher wasclear about his fascination in a 1969 interview: 'These things are so fullof fantasy there is absolutely no sense in trying to paint them; I realisedthat no artist could have made them better,' he said, 'This is purelyeconomic architecture. They throw it up, they use it, they misuse it, theythrow it away.' 34A term the artists return to periodically isnomadicarchitecture:' the structures are 'not like the pyramids,' they have said,they are not 'for eternity.' 35 Their vision is of an architecture free of theburden of culture, free of the burden of identity: 'An Italian gasometerdoes not look Italian and a Chinese blast furnace does not look

Chinese,' they have said, and it is this form of looking that is soappealing; it is this form of looking that delights. 36

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The strongest reference for identity-thinking for anyone growing up inGermany during the war, of course, would be the construction ofGermanness and its others and this was formative for the Bechers: 'theindustrial world is completely divorced from' such identity thinking, fromNazism, Bernd has said, 'It has absolutely nothing to do with ideology. Itcorresponds more to the pragmatic English way of thinking.' As theartists note, their nineteenth-century approach itself, like the structuresthey photograph, is drawn from 'the soul of industrial thought.' Methodand subject matter, form and content, serve as reciprocal homologoussupport for each other: just as with industry, so photography in theirhands is assumed to be 'by its very nature free of ideology.'37 Thissense of freedom, this delight in the industrial as an alternative toideology, is the engine sustaining their distinctive photographiccomportment.

All the end-of-ideology claims that developed in the 1950s like theBechers were born of similar assumptions. Each arose with a theory ofideology based on the principle of identity as in Nazi ideology, forexample, or Communist ideology and any cultural development thatweakened or diluted identity was understood to do so as well to theideology that sustained that identity. As Raymond Aron put it the sameyear the Bechers embarked on their project, for example, ideology wassupposed to draw its authority from 'the longing for a purpose, forcommunion with the people, for something controlled by an idea or awill.'38 This identity-thesis was embraced across a wide politicalspectrum from Aron leftward and in many respects it continues to formour own moment now. But it is important for our purposes to recall howthis model of ideology was different from that first developed by Marx,which, after all, was the model that subtended the ambitions of theengineer generation and that, in principle, was returned to in thepostwar critical rejoinder of the Bechers.

What the modernists of the 1920s and 1930s had wanted was a kind ofmaterialist foothold that would sustain the progressive development ofidentity in social planning, in the machine, in their productivism itself

and that could hold its own against the vagaries of taste in a worldincreasingly dominated by consumerism. Such consumerism was a bigpart of the modernity of artists like Rodchenko, Moholy, Renger-Patzschand others, of course, but as a group they had no aspiration for an anti-aesthetic per se (as would later be the case with Pop Art and otherdevelopments in the 1960s, for example), no aspiration to abandon theclaims of science, no aspiration for negation that rested on its ownlaurels. In the Marxian schema that they had inherited, the very momentthat ideology in its identity-based sense is said to be negated is itselfthe turning point into ideology proper or the moment when, as the

Communist Manifesto put it famously, 'all that is solid melts into air, allthat is holy is profaned' and identity is given over to process, social

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relations are given over to relations between things and politics is givenover to economics: 'All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train ofancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.'39

This type of ideology is given not by propagandists and ideologists inan important sense there can be no such thing as a capitalist Goebbels

but is given instead always already right in the technology. 'ModernIndustry never views or treats the existing form of production process asthe definitive one,' Marx wrote. That is, it can never be established asdoctrine. As such, he continued, it isrevolutionary' and opposed to allearlier modes of production: 'By means of machinery, chemicalprocesses and other methods, it is continually transforming not only inthe technical basis of production, but also the functions of the workerand the social combinations of the labor process.. [It] incessantly throws

masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production toanother.'40 This movement is the 'nomadic' quality of modern industrythat the Bechers rely on to make their point it is this, they say, thatislike nature' and their ambitious project speaks equally to Marx'saccount of industry as progressive social change as it does to hisaccount of it as bearer of false consciousness, alienation andexploitation.41

The Bechers work this boundary between promise and threat differently,however: their project provides a systematic manner of viewing the

world that wagers its own system of value, and thereby its distinctiveform of autonomy, against its architectural subject: where thearchitecture promises pure instrumentality, they provide a purity ofaesthetic form. As such, while their work makes its own claim to be freeof ideology, its own claim to being apolitical, it does so differently thandoes the industry they photograph. Their method as artists is to pit onemodern form against another, to pit the nomadism of aesthetic delightagainst the nomadism of industry, to pit the (idealistic, German) soul ofaesthetic experience against the (pragmatic, English) 'soul of industrialthought.' In so doing they have produced a full-blown nineteenth-

century archive exactly in the manner that Foucault would describe. It isan archive not of bodies but of machines, however, not of the formal,physiognomic variations of deviance but of industriousness, not of thosediscarded by modernity but of that modernity has shed of itself.42 Thedelight offered by their art in its machinic rhythms and repetitions, inthe play of form across the registers of its objectivity and systematicityis therefore realised only againstthe revolutionary promise of themodern industry it depicts. It is a view of industrial history as if it werenature, as if it were an organic process unto itself, as if it were a slideshow or a picture book flipping from one image to the next and the next

and the next. The structurescome and go almost like nature,' they havesaid, 'This was interesting for us.'43

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Enlightenment

Art and industry, thus, stand opposed in the Bechers work in a mannerdifferent from, even contrary to, their Machine-Age forebears: putschematically, their project is one of aestheticizing industry rather thanindustrialising art. This, it might be said, is the other leg ofpostmodernism in their work, the way in which it engages in the play ofsignification with diminished concern for its attachment to some properlymaterial reality. This is also the way in which it plays with andtransforms the Neue Sachlichkeitlegacy of documentary photographywith itssocialistic view,' its core critical materialist mandate of author-as-producer reportage.

Fig.4rnd Becher and Hilla BecherCoal Bunkers1974Tate. Purchased 1974 Bernd & HillaBecher View in Tate CollectionBut this turn away from modernism's politicised vision of industry is inno way the whole story. Art and industry also rely on a commonfoundation in the Bechers work, and it is this that can be said to be itscontinued embrace of modernism, its faith in the power ofrepresentation to reveal and comprehend the hidden material conditionsof the world it addresses, its faith in the project of Enlightenment. Eventhough the Bechers work distances itself from most of the affectiveattachments of the engineer-cum-worker ideal of their forebears, it doesshare with that ideal (in a manner that is fully modern) faith in the moreabstract aim of system. (fig.4) Their work cares little for the mimicking ofthe consumer world and the consumer's vision that emerged as aprogram side-by-side with theirs in the various pre-Pop and Popmovements of the 1950s and early 1960s. In this way they are verydifferent from their contemporary Gerhard Richter, for example, withwhom they are often compared (fig.5). Like Richter, theirs is a coolvision, detached from maudlin sentiments of all kinds, political orotherwise, but, unlike Richer, that detachment is not founded on ironyand the pleasure taken in their project is not the consumer's pleasure ofexpenditure without return, of process without aim. Indeed, it might besaid, if there is one thing the Becher project is more than anything else,one thing that distinguishes it from the core critical motif of their pop-culturalist contemporaries, it is the apparent earnestness with which itembraces systematicity, the way in which it holds onto modernism'sseriousness of purpose and concentration of aim even as it abandonsthe purpose or aim itself.

Fig.5Gerhard RichterElizabeth1966Tate. Purchased 1988 Gerhard Richter View in TateCollection

What then has this residual modernist ideal of systematicity meant forthe Bechers and their audiences, and what might it mean for us now?What, in the end, is the value of their archive? What is the value of their

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=835&searchid=9289http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=835&searchid=9289http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=16594&searchid=9087http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=16594&searchid=9087http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=16594&searchid=9087http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=16594&searchid=9087http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=16594&searchid=9087http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=835&searchid=9289

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old-fashioned artist-cum-engineer modernism? Certainly it has taken onthe form and weight of the ethical principle of commitment, as arguedabove. Certainly, too, it has provided occasion for aesthetic experienceor delight. But these standards on their own are abstract forms andempty of historical content, empty of any claim for why such an ethic orsuch an aesthetic might appeal or serve its constituency and its time.The historical promise of systemic form had been clear enough for theirmachine-age forebears: it was to carry the new vision, the societyplanned by artists; it was to be scientific management raised to the levelof social engineering through its visual forms. Its promise, in short, wasthat it would produce, as the Bechers have said disapprovingly, 'asocialistic view a fresh view of the world, a new man, a newbeginning.'

From our latter-day perspective, it is important to remember that this

critique is really a product of the generation of the Bechers and Foucaultand did not emerge immediately after the war but instead only arose inthe 1950s. In the earlier postwar period the old prewar project for a newman was actually revitalised and given a new mission, if only for amoment. Against the fluctuating political passions aroused by theemerging anti-communist bunker culture of the late 1940s and early1950s, many public intellectuals came to approach the question ofpolitical subjectivity with a renewed sense of urgency and purpose.Much discussed statements such asModern Man is Obsolete' bySaturday Revieweditor Norman Cousins and 'The Real Problem is inthe Hearts of Men' by leading world government advocate AlbertEinstein set the tone in the United States and paralleled the moreimmediately pressing self-scrutiny in Germany institutionalised in the re-education program and developed in a more philosophical manner byintellectuals such as Karl Jaspers: 'Brainwork is not all this requires,'Jaspers wrote in his lecture 'The Question of German Guilt': 'Theintellect must put the heart to work, arouse it to an inner activity which inturn carries the brainwork.'44 'Our poisoned hearts must be cured', ishow Camus put it; we must 'remake our political mentality.'45

Photographers once again assumed a special role for thisreconstruction, this production of a new, new vision and new, new man.Such was the mission adopted programmatically by Edward Steichenfor The Family of Man, for example, and it was the mandate assumedby Otto Steinert for his Subjektive Fotografie: 'As the most widely-spread vehicle of expression up to the present day,' he wrote,'photography is called upon to mould the visual consciousness of ourage. And as the pictorial technique most generally comprehensible andmost easily accessible to lay hands on, it is particularly fitted to promotethe mutual understanding of the nations.'46 Like Steichen's aim to

illustrate common human experience in an iconography of joy andsuffering, loss and gain, etc., so Steinert sought a discursive means to

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represent human commonality by invoking a subjectivised experience ofvision, even when industry was the subject at hand.

In a significant sense the search for a 'visual consciousness of our age'promoted by Steichen and Steinert, like the heart-work called for by

Cousins, Einstein, Jaspers, and Camus was similar to that of the warconsciousness that it promised to move beyond, at least structurally. Inboth cases in the wartime German Volk, for example, and in thepostwar Family of Man the primary ideological goal was to produce apowerful and passionate sense of belonging, to produce the affectiveexperience of nation. The structure of the social bond, in both cases,thus, was based on the principle of identity or passionate attachment toa shared sense of self, even if the later attachment was to be builtaround shared guilt. It was a social form generated through ideologicalmeans of the first, identity-driven variety discussed above rather than by

the second, Marxian account. The structural correspondence of wartimeand postwar approaches to political subjectivity was an insight not loston the Bechers generation and one that motivated their rejection of theone-world, hearts-of-men model.

There are, of course, other possible levers for generating a 'visualconsciousness of our age' than that of the passionate attachments ofone-world nationalism, like that of Steichen, or the passionateindulgences of a sentimental one-world subjectivism, like that of OttoSteinert. On the idealistic end of the spectrum, for example, there is the

old philosopher's dream of collectively generated enlightenment orcommunicative reason developed through the search for shared interestand the principle of common human reason. More soberly, perhaps,and far closer to our own experience now, there is the capitalist'sdreamworld of individual interest, or a fluid collective economy ofindividual wagers, risks, investments, losses and gains brought intocommerce through the market-logic of exchange. As discussed above,however, the Bechers own practice and the model of sociality itpromises is not vested in either of these systems. Neither collectivist norindividualist, they work the principle of systematicity with equal passion,

equal commitment and delight, to their own alternative 'rhythms andrepetitions,' that is, to their own distinctive aesthetic ends.

Through this differential setting of form against content, aestheticagainst instrumental aims, the Bechers deploy the originalEnlightenment promise of the aesthetic, one lost on any simple accountof the delight given in their work that would see it as unexpected beautywithout philosophy, as delight without reason. That promise, in Kant'sformula, is the development of 'the faculty for judging an object . withoutany interest.'47Judgment, in the Bechers work, assumes the abstract

form of a concept which allows for aesthetic response to take place in amanner similar to cognition but through which, as Kant says, 'no thing is

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actually cognized.'48 The experience of their work is thus realised assatisfaction (or dissatisfaction) in the object without any specificindividual aim or instrumental purpose being satisfied (or frustrated),without any notion of individual interest or collective will. The experienceproduced, the delight that conveys satisfaction, thus, is generalised andendowed with the presumption of universality or, in Kant's terms,'common sense.' 49

It is this experience of universality that the Bechers project courts andposits as its systemic aim; it is this experience that serves as analternative 'visual consciousness of our age' different from either thecollective passions of political identification or the individual interests ofthe consumer. The key to their system, to the particular form of socialvalue they produce, lies in the fact that the objects they photograph are'anonymous.' The Bechers present modern industry in a manner that

disavows its social, political and economic value to the beholder and, inso doing, makes it available anew via an alternative categoryaesthetic value or value 'without any interest.' This is a particular form ofdelight, philosophically distinct from other sorts of visual pleasure, and itconjures up a particular form of commitment, one that carries with itboth the promise and the burden of social consequence. By creating thecircumstances for such experience using aging industrial structures stillresonant with the memory of all their great modern ambitions, theBechers create a powerful sense of that disavowal of instrumentalvalue, that purposiveness without purpose, as Kant named it, as loss,as the experience of no interestwhere interest was once housed, of nopassionwhere passion once resided. In so doing they give us a fullyelaborated neo-Kantian judgment made melancholy, a fully developedarchive structured around an absent ideal, and the great promise ofEnlightenment is again recovered in all of its original glory but now onthe foundation of its own lost materialist soul. As such there is noquestion that they have successfully incorporated "the past into thepresent and weld[ed] that present to a future," and have done so, "at astroke," as Merleau-Ponty put it, that is, in and through their bearingtoward the world, through their standpoint between distance andproximity, their gaze that looks neither up nor down but instead"straight-on" so it does not "hide or exaggerate or depict anything in anuntrue fashion." The final question the one that only we can evaluate

concerns the ongoing vitality of this comportment now, the ongoingmeaningfulness of the past it carries forward into our future.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. In 1970 he moved to Los Angeles andstudied photography at the Art Center College of Design. He lives in New York and

Tokyo. He is best known for his highly stylized photographic series of seascapes,movie theaters, natural history dioramas, waxworks and Buddhist sculptures. Theseseries provoke fundamental questions about the relationship of photography and

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time, as well as exploring the mysterious and ineffable nature of reality.

In recent years, Sugimoto's work has become increasingly concrete at the same timeas it has become notably more abstract. It has broken out of, or beyond,photographic illusion to touch the moment of an ideal space rendered inphotography. In his Architecture series (1997-2002), rather than photographing keymodernist buildings to elucidate their lines and volumes, Sugimoto blurred the imagein an effort to capture not the buildings themselves but mental images of them.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1948, and lives andworks in New York and Tokyo. His interest in art began early. Hisreading of Andr Bretons writings led to his discovery ofSurrealism and Dada and a lifelong connection to the work andphilosophy of Marcel Duchamp. Central to Sugimotos work is theidea that photography is a time machine, a method of preservingand picturing memory and time. This theme provides the definingprinciple of his ongoing series, including "Dioramas" (1976),"Theaters" (1978), and "Seascapes" (1980). Sugimoto sees withthe eye of the sculptor, painter, architect, and philosopher. Heuses his camera in a myriad of ways to create images that seem toconvey his subjects essence, whether architectural, sculptural,painterly, or of the natural world. He places extraordinary value oncraftsmanship, printing his photographs with meticulous attentionand a keen understanding of the nuances of the silver print and its

potential for tonal richnessin his seemingly infinite palette ofblacks, whites, and grays. Recent projects include an architecturalcommission at Naoshima Contemporary Art Center in Japan, forwhich Sugimoto designed and built a Shinto shrine, and thephotographic series, "Conceptual Forms," inspired by Duchamps"Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even."Sugimoto has received fellowships from the GuggenheimFoundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; in 2001, hereceived Hasselblad Foundation International Award in

Photography. He has had one-person exhibitions at theMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of ModernArt, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Museum of ContemporaryArt, Chicago; and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo;among others. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,Washington, DC, and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, were jointorganizers of a 2005 Sugimoto retrospective.

This extraordinary book

shot in only 3 days

presentsan unexpected look at what remains of Chernobyl and the

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town of Pripyat, Russia.

In the 11 days following the Chernobyl catastrophe on

April 26, 1986, more than 116,000 people were

permanently evacuated from the area surrounding thenuclear power plant.

Declared unfit for human habitation, the "Zones of

Exclusion" includes the towns of Pripyat (established in the1970s to house workers) and Chernobyl.

In May 2001, Robert Polidori photographed what was left

behind in this dead zone. His richly detailed images move

from the burned-out control room of Reactor 4 where

technicians staged the experiment that caused the disaster to the unfinished apartment complexes, ransacked

schools and abandoned nurseries that remain as evidenceof all those people who once called Pripyat home.

Nearby, trucks and tanks used in the clean up efforts rest

in a car graveyard. Some are covered in lead shrouds

and others have been robbed of parts. Houseboats andbarges rust in the contaminated waters of the Pripyat

River. Foliage grows over the sidewalks

and hides themodest homes of Chernobyl.

In his large-scale photographs, Mr. Polidori captures thefaded colors and desolate atmosphere of these two towns.

He produces haunting documents that present the reader

with a rare view of not just a disastrous event but aplace and the people who lived there.

About Robert Polidori

Robert Polidori was born in Montreal in 1951 and lives inNew York City. He has exhibited photographs in Paris,

Brasilia, New York, Los Angeles and Minneapolis.

He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and has

been featured in Geo,Architectural Digest GermanyandNest Magazine.

Mr. Polidori has received numerous honors, including a

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World Press Award for his coverage of the Getty Museum

and two Alfred Eisenstaedt Awards for his work in Havanaand Brasilia.

Robert Polidori has been a staff photographer at The New Yorker for

more than ten years. He has published many photography books,

including Havana (2001), Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and

Chernobyl (2003), Metropolis (2004), and After the Flood

(2006). A resident of New York City, his work is known

internationally, appearing in such magazines as Vanity Fair, Cond

Nast Traveler,Newsweek, and Wallpaper. He received the World

Press Photo Award in 1997, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award forMagazine Photography in 1999 and 2000, and Communication Arts

awards in 2007 and 2008. He has shown at many galleries and is

represented by the Edwynn Houk Gallery, in New York City. In

2006, Polidori's series of photographs of New Orleans after

Hurricane Katrina was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Polidori was born in Montreal and relocated in the nineteen-

seventies to New York, where he began working for Jonas Mekas at

the Anthology Film Archives. He received his M.A. from the State

University of New York at Buffalo in 1980.

Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societiesand theirchanges, small pieces of history in suspension.The state of ruin is essentially atemporary situation that happens atsome point, the volatile result of change of eraand the fall of empires.This fragility, the time elapsed but even so running fast, leadus to watch them one very last time :being dismayed, or admire, making uswondering about the permanence of things.Photography appeared to us as amodest wayto keep a little bit of this ephemeral state.

http://www.marchandmeffre.com/index.htmlhttp://www.marchandmeffre.com/index.html

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Over the past generation Detroit has suffered economically worse than any other ofthe major American cities and its rampant urban decay is now glaringly apparentduring this current recession. Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre documented this

disintegration, showcasing structures that were formerly a source of civic pride, andwhich now stand as monuments to the citys fall from grace.

Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes,small pieces of history in suspension. The state of ruin is temporary by nature, thevolatile result of the end of an era and the fall of empires. This fragility, the timeelapsed but even so running fast, lead us to watch them one very last time: beingdismayed, or admiring, wondering about the permanence of things. Photographyappeared to us as a modest way to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state.

In December 2001, the old Highland Park police department in

Detroitwas temporarily disbanded. The building it vacated wasabandoned with everything in it: furniture, uniforms, typewriters,crime files and even the countless mug-shots of criminals who hadpassed through there. Among the debris that photographers YvesMarchand and Romain Meffre found there in 2005 was a scatteringof stiff, rotting cardboard files each bearing a woman's name.

. Yves Marchand / Romain Meffre: The Ruins of Detroit

. by Robert Polidori

.

. Buy it from the Guardian bookshopSearch the Guardian bookshop

In total 11 women had been catalogued by the police, includingDebbie Ann Friday, Vicki Truelove, Juanita Hardy, Bertha JeanMason and Valerie Chalk. Down in the dank basement of thepolice station, where "human samples" were stored and had

been abandoned along with everything else the two Frenchphotographers also uncovered the name of the man who was

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/detroithttp://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/detroithttp://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9783869300429http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9783869300429http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9783869300429http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9783869300429http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/detroit

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linked to all of the women's deaths. Benjamin Atkins was anotorious serial killer. Between 1991 and 1992 he left the bodies ofhis victims in various empty buildings across the city.

A photograph simply entitled Criminal Investigation Report,Highland Park Police Stationis one of the many startling images inan extraordinary book, The Ruins of Detroit, that Marchand andMeffre have made from their seven week-long visits to Detroitbetween 2005 and 2009. The book's photographs suggest thecountless strange and sad narratives from urban life in America inthe mid-to-late 20th century. It is also a book of testimony, whichnot only illustrates the dramatic decline of a major American city,but of the American Dream itself. Many of the images seem post-apocalyptic, as if some sudden catastrophe has struck downtownDetroit, forcing everyone to abandon homes and workplaces andflee the city.

Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbingtestament to the glory and the destructive cost of Americancapitalism: the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the mostpowerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decayingbuildings and streets. There is a formal beauty here too, though,reminiscent of Robert Polidori's images of post-hurricane Katrina

New Orleans. "It seems like Detroit has just been left to die," saysMarchand, "Many times we would enter huge art deco buildingswith once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinaryfrescoes, and everything was crumbling and covered in dust, andthe sense that you had entered a lost world was almostoverwhelming. In a very real way, Detroit is a lost world or atleast a lost city where the magnificence of its past is everywhereevident."

This sense of loss is what Marchand and Meffre have captured inimage after image, whether of vast downtown vistas where everytower block is boarded-up or ravaged interior landscapes wherethe baroque stonework, often made from marble imported fromEurope, is slowly crumbling and collapsing. The pair havephotographed once-grand hotels that were built in a carefree mixof gothic, art deco, Moorish and medieval styles, as well ascountless baroque theatres, movie houses and ballrooms theVanity, where big band giants such as Duke Ellington and TommyDorsey played in the 1930s; the Eastown theatre, where

pioneering hard rock groups like Iggy and the Stooges and the

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MC5 held court in the 1960s.

They have also captured for posterity the desolate interiors thatonce made up the city's civic infrastructure: courthouses,

churches, schools, dentists, police stations, jails, public librariesand swimming pools, all of which have most of their originalfixtures and fittings intact. "As Europeans, we were looking with anoutsider's eye, which made downtown Detroit seem even morestrange and dramatic," says Meffre. "We are not used to seeingempty buildings left intact. In Europe, salvage companies move inimmediately and take what they can sell as antiques. Here, theyonly take the metal piping to sell for scrap. In the Vanity ballroomalone, we saw four giant art deco chandeliers, beautiful objects,each one unique. It was almost unbelievable that they could still bethere. It is as if America has no sense of its own architecturalhistory and culture."

Marchand (29) and Meffre (23) have been taking photographstogether since they first met in 2002. They are both children ofParis's banlieue, hailing from the southern suburbs of the city.Without formal training, they describe themselves as "autodidactswho share an obsession with ruins", which, says Meffre, "allow youto appear to enter a different world, a lost world, and to report back

from there".

Having photographed old buildings "mainly disused theatres" inParis, they happened upon an image ofMichiganCentral trainstation in Detroit while surfing the internet for pictures ofabandoned buildings. "It was so stately and so dramatic that wedecided right then we had to go," says Meffre, "but we were naive;we had no idea of the scale of the project, of the vastness ofdowntown Detroit and its ruins. There is nothing comparable inEurope."

The essayist Edmund Wilson wrote of Detroit in the 1930s: "Youcan see here, as it is impossible to do in a more varied andcomplex city, the whole structure of industrial society." Back then,Detroit was the world capital of car production, the place where, in1913, Henry Ford had built the first plant devoted to massproduction, employing 90,000 workers in order to make enoughModel T Fords to meet the demands of a burgeoning domesticmarket. The city's architecture reflected its wealth and ambition:

the waiting room of Michigan Central station was designed to looklike a giant Roman bathhouse, ballrooms were built in

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extravagantly baroque styles that equalled anything in New York.

By the 1950s, the city was home to almost 2 million people, and itsmainly single-storey suburbs had spread over 120 square miles.

Detroit's dramatic decline began soon afterwards, though, andthose same suburbs would play their part in the long saga ofabandonment and decay. The collapse of the automobile industrystarted in the 1950s and reached crisis point in the 1960s and1970s, due mainly to the demand for cheaper imported cars, mademainly in Japan, and the attendant rise in global oil prices. By then,Detroit was, in the words of Thomas J Sugrue, author of TheOrigins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit,who provides the book's illuminating introductory essay, "one ofAmerica's most racially polarised cities, the result of deep-rootedhostilities between the city's white and African-Americanpopulations".

The so called "white flight" from the city centre began in the 1950sand, soon, as Sugrue puts it, "an increasingly black city wassurrounded by a ring of communities that were all white". This"white noose", as one contemporary observer referred to it, helpedstrangle the inner city, both economically and socially, turning itinto a series of large ghettos intercut by freeway. Unrest reached a

head in 1967, when 43 people were killed in a week of rioting thatstarted after police officers raided an after-hours drinking club andwhich left the downtown streets looking like a war zone. Sincethen, the city has been left increasingly to its own devicesabandoned by politicians, planners, developers and businesses,by all, in fact, but the black urban poor. "Even grocery stores andsupermarkets disappeared from the city," writes Sugrue. "By thefirst decade of the 21st century, observers described Detroit as 'afood desert' a place without even a single, well-stocked

supermarket within its boundaries."

The tension of the 60s coincided with the moment when Detroitwas the capital of American popular music, with the Stooges andthe MC5 creating a proto-punk music that remains influential to thisday and the Tamla Motown hit factory, founded by producer-cum-entrepreneur Berry Gordy, creating hit after hit for the likes ofMarvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes and the Temptations.Gordy, too, though, deserted the city in 1972, moving the Motownoperation to Los Angeles. Still, throughout the hard times, Detroit

has remained a place of pioneering pop music and is regarded as

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the city where techno was created in the 1980s. Today's Detroit,particularly the blighted 8 Mile Road stretch that separates the cityfrom its northern suburbs, is synonymous with the hard-edged rapmusic ofEminem, the city's most notorious son, whose songs

reflect the edginess and gang culture of the place.

Of late, there are plans afoot to restore some of Detroit's historicbuildings and an even more ambitious plan to "green" many of theopen spaces where weeds, trees and prairie grasses have grownamong tower blocks and disused car plants. Detroit may thriveagain but it will take considerable political will and enormousreinvestment.

The Ruins of Detroittells the city's story so far in one starklybeautiful photograph after another, all of which add up to nothingless than an end-of-empire narrative. Or as Sugrue puts it: "Theabandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses,and gutted skyscrapers that Yves Marchand and Romain Meffrechronicle are the artefacts of Detroit's astonishing rise as a globalcapital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent intoruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dreamand the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty,between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and

painfully visible. No place epitomises the creative and destructiveforces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present."

Based in Sydney, Peter has been a photographer since his teens and has

created an impressive and substantial portfolio of work. Raised in the film

era, Peter mainly shoots with full-frame DSLRs but still retains and shoots

with several film SLRs, including a Canon EOS-3.

Peter's images are increasingly being exhibited, sold, and published,

including work incorporated in a high school text on digital imaging and

book covers. He has also published many extensive photographic tutorials,

and because they are written in plain English have proved enormously

popular with photographers, both amateur and professional, around the

world.

Originally, and still, inspired by the work of Ansel Adams and other

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members of f64, Peter Hill seeks to capture moments within the camera

and without relying on computerised fakery, through extensive use of

filters and specialist lenses, including several Tilt+Shift lenses and "fast"

primes such as the Voigtlander f2 40mm. He also regularly shoots with an

Infrared DSLR (a converted Canon EOS 10D) that has a interior B&W filter

for uniquely strong black and white images.

Never before published, Rail Tracks is a unique collaboration between twointernational writers of remarkable achievement, and offers a threadedreflection on the atmospherics and allure of the train, with its attendant storiesof love, longing, labour and migration. Developing out of a 2005 collaborationwith theatre company Complicite on a unique, site-specific performance,Vanishing Points for the Gymnasium, King's Cross, London, it is an intimate,sensual, exploratory and insightful meditation on place and time, journeys andarrivals. It will be available in several editions internationally, fully illustratedwith the evocative photography of Tereza Stehlkov.

John Berger (Britain, France)

John Berger is a storyteller, essayist, novelist, film-maker, dramatist and critic,whose body of work embodies his concern for, in Geoff Dyer's words, "theenduring mystery of great art and the lived experience of the oppressed." Heis one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years, onewho has explored the relationships between the individual and society, culture

and politics, and experience and expression in a series of novels, essays,plays, films, photographic collaborations and performances, unmatched in

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their diversity, ambition and reach. His television series and book Ways ofSeeing revolutionised the way that Fine Art is read and understood, while hisengagements with European peasantry and migration in the fiction trilogy IntoTheir Labours and A Seventh Man stand as models of empathy and insight.

His recent book, Hold Everything Dear (Verso Books) is a remarkablecollection of essays and reflections on the meaning of commitment andresistance. From striking meditations on the 'war on terror' to movingencounters in Palestine and considerations of radical cultural practise, itdeepens and extends our understanding of the difficult present moment. Hisnew novel, From A to X (Verso Books) is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize2008.

John Berger lives in France.www.johnberger.org.uk

Anne Michaels (Canada)

A multi-award winning poet and novelist, Michaels is the author of threecollections of poetry and the fiction Fugitive Pieces, which won the OrangePrize, was a bestseller worldwide and has been adapted, with acclaim, for thecinema. She has recently completed a second novel, The Winter Vault, to bepublished in 2009. She lives in Toronto.

John Constable John Constable (11 June 1776 - 31 March

1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is

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known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale,

the area surrounding his home - now known as "Constable

Country"- which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I

should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John

Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".

His most famous paintings include Dedham Vale of 1802 and

The Hay Wain of 1821. Although his paintings are now among

the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never

financially successful and did not become a member of the

establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the

age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native

England.