Bechers exhibition in London until March 28th '26

[noodleJam]

For lovers of the Hilla & Bernd Becher's work, Sprüth & Magers Gallery in Central London are hosting a collection circa 50 original prints.

Having visited a few times last week, it was a wonderful to see the tonality, quality, composition, clarity and beauty of the images.

Bernd & Hilla Becher - Bernd & Hilla Becher - London – Sprüth Magers

Sprüth Magers is pleased to present a solo exhibition featuring several groupings of the Bechers’ most recognisable archetypal forms: gas tanks, water towers, winding towers and framework houses. This will be their first solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, London, in over a decade, marking the...

spruethmagers.com

 

[Ardpatrick]

I’ve loved these photographs for decades. Amazing.

But your link to the London show has me ponder something I haven’t really noticed before - the sheer blankness of the skys.

Obviously the Bechers were very careful about the light they shot in, and needless to say the darkroom work is immaculate. So I doubt that blankness is accidental. Midtones are moderate to lower contrast, and so I don’t think they were pushing film to blow out highlights. Maybe? I wonder did they shoot with a filter which would have the opposite effect to a yellow filter on skys? Or just carefully hold back the sky in printing? There is tonality there - a clear separation with the print border. But very little to no cloud.

Maybe someone more technically proficient might have already cracked this?

 

[koraks]

There is tonality there - a clear separation with the print border.

I don't see it. I do see a difference in tone between the matte and the sky.

AFAIK they photographed under very specific conditions - overcast, featureless skies. One big softbox.

I think the choice to have "no sky" was very deliberate and consistently maintained throughout the process. No distractions from the subject - these were typologies of man-made structures, after all. Not of skies, and also not (insofar as I know) intended as 'pretty pictures'. Uniformity was a hard requirement resulting from the core concept behind this body of work and the choice for a featureless sky would have been both practical (it's a relatively common weather condition, so something you could bank on) as well as effective (no distraction).

Btw, I would describe midtone contrast as "rather high", which follows again from the deliberately chosen lighting conditions that flatten out the tonal scale, allowing for everything to be 'brought back' in development and esp. printing without having to become heavy-handed with the burning & dodging or other 'creative' contrast controls. Excessive shadow areas or very brightly lit parts of the structures would of course have been antithetical.

 

[Ardpatrick]

Yes it’s completely intentional. And remarkably consistent - to draw on your Softbox analogy these works have a ‘studio’ character.

But practically I don’t they could have achieved that consistency of lighting, over multiple locations (Northern Europe / USA) over several decades with just good meteorology! There has to be some photographic know-how at work too.

 

[koraks]

But practically I don’t they could have achieved that consistency of lighting, over multiple locations (Northern Europe / USA) over several decades with just good meteorology!

I think that's the 'trick' though. Like I said - overcast is a pretty good option to bet on. Sooner or later, it'll happen. Insofar as I know, the Bechers would scout locations and only go out and make images on suitable days - i.e. days (and time of day) with the desired lighting conditions. Undoubtedly they also culled their work to end up with the consistency they were looking for. Keep in mind that this is a hyper-focus on a specific concept that they maintained for decades.

Turn it around - suppose they were doing some kind of magical trickery that allowed them to shoot their subjects on, let's say, partly cloudy days. How would they have made the subject look like it was lit with a massive softbox? Team up with the Christos and borrow some of their blankets? The simple answer is that everything looks like it was lit by a massive softbox because it was shot under a massive softbox - an overcast sky.

This is not about technical trickery. This is about focus, project management, planning and get the f*ing work done!

 

[Ardpatrick]

You’re probably right - shoot under the right light for starters. There is a little variety across the work in terms of the light falling on the depicted typology - sometimes a little highlight and shadow, but very minimal. I’ve no doubt there was plenty of culling, re-shooting, and a little darkroom craft too.

I admire the focus over decades, and I think one can only admire the patience, perseverance, and planning involved.

I still think there may have been some photographic Know-how in there. If you knew you wanted blank sky wouldn’t you over expose a little to push mid-tones up the curve? Use a light Cyan filter that would help over-expose any visible blue sky? I think it makes sense and doesn’t diminish the project in the slightest.

 

[koraks]

Look, the approach of the Bechers is well documented in many books, interviews etc. They just waited for the right conditions. Blank sky, constant light, mornings, with as little people in the scene as possible. They apparently use the same film, development etc. over the course of the 3 decades or so that the project spanned.

And yes, of course they emphasized midtones in the process. They probably developed the film a little longer than normal and printed at a relatively high grade.

any visible blue sky?

There wasn't any!!!

Perhaps you should look up some documentation on their work, read an interview here and there. It'll help you understand what was going on. The whole talk about a filter here or there is, sorry to be blunt about it, an insignificant, unimportant and entirely irrelevant sideshow. It's not what this is about in any way.

 

[Ardpatrick]

Oh Koraks!

Why resort to impatience and arrogance when I mused aloud about a legitimate aspect of how the work was made, to the OP. I was hardly dogmatic in tone. You decided to respond! You didn’t need to if it irked you.

I’ve been looking at this stuff for decades. I know it backwards and have the books etc. I talked to Benjamin Buchloh about the ‘look’ of Becher prints 30 years ago. I don’t need your tutelage, thanks.

The internet, eh?

 

[koraks]

I know it backwards and have the books etc.

So you already knew the answer; why did you ask? Why not tell us all how they did it - and, more importantly, explain to us all why the question was supposedly relevant to begin with?

 

[noodleJam]

For those needing a little explanation, a BBC article by by Alistair Sooke nicely explains their process and the influence on their students:

Subject matter and mode of presentation aren’t the only distinctive things about the Bechers’ photographs; a draconian, dispassionate style is a hallmark of their work, too. Influenced by the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) photography of Germans August Sander and Karl Blossfeldt, they always documented their subjects in a scrupulously objective fashion: shooting from the same height and at the same time of day, and ensuring that nothing but milky, opaque grey sky was visible in the background. They also believed that fine-art photography had to be black-and-white. “Their style is very reduced, very strict,” [Martin] Engler says. “You could call it austere.”

The stunning photographs that are like paintings

A generation of photographers from Germany transformed photography in the 1980s and 90s, and credit is due to their two teachers, writes Alastair Sooke.

www.bbc.com

And this is a rather wonderful archive footage of them photographing in Ohio:

 

[Ardpatrick]

So you already knew the answer; why did you ask? Why not tell us all how they did it - and, more importantly, explain to us all why the question was supposedly relevant to begin with?

What language! Aren't you supposed to be moderating this forum?

Why the aggression / impatience towards my original enquiry? Your impatient response clearly assumes my enquiry comes from a place of ignorance about their work - that I don't get what the work is about. "Go away and read some books etc"

In my reply I pointed out that I am not ignorant about the work at all, nor that my question arises from ignorance or disdain. I revere the work. None of that contradicts my original gentle enquiry about how the sky is handled in their photographs. How can that be such a testy topic to muse over on a photographers forum? Laughable.

A cursory look at the images of the Gas Tanks on the Spruth Magers website shows that despite the blank sky, in several of the images the ribs of the tank armatures (!) cast vertical shadows onto the sides of the tanks. Some harsher than others. That indicates directional sunlight, albeit maybe with some haze. That's without even digging. The idea that this enquiry is not nuanced but ignorant, and that somehow it should be disparaged on a photographers forum, where people are elsewhere routinely fetishising the process of other photographers (Ansel Adams f.x) is just off.

It's too easy to take offence online. I won't. But please don't shut down an honest and open enquiry. Asserting that there were no blue skys is simply not credible. You weren't there.

 

[koraks]

It really doesn't matter, regardless of how much you press the point. The matter is irrelevant.

That doesn't mean I shut it down - the thread is open and anyone is welcome to respond (and so am I!) You're free to express your interest in the technical minutiae involved in a small part of making this work, and I'm free to express the viewpoint that the answer has no utility.

There's a reason why in all the interviews and books about this body of work you won't be able to find whether or not they used a cyan filter, and weather or not on some shots there was a bleak fraction of sunlight filtering through the cloudbase.

Sometimes, the real answer to the question is in the lack of a clear answer. Again, you're free to ask it anyway, and anyone is free to go into the depths of the spectral sensitivity of the film used etc. I still think it's a silly exercise: regardless of how they did it, what they did was deliberate as they made that explicit. As for the technicalities, we all know at least a couple of ways it could be achieved - so from that angle, there's also very utility (and at worst, a distraction) in the exercise of figuring it out.

As to your question why I don't simply ignore it: you're right to ask. For me, it's perplexing how there's apparently a tendency to look for some kind of technical deus ex machina in work that's so evidently not about technique. Moreover, they've been explicit as to this aspect of the "how", which happens to boil down to something entirely unrelated to gear, so the attempt to dig until we hit upon camera hardware (or other bits of photographic paraphernalia) is downright puzzling.

Even more so, insofar as technique played a role, it was to render it as transparent as physically possible - essentially to remove it from the equation. The makers of these works did this deliberately. In interviews, the Bechers never directed the course of the conversation into the direction of technique - which surely they would have done if they had believed it to be essential. They answered direct questions about it, but for the most part appear to have discussed the heart of the matter, i.e. (my interpretation) an ontological investigation of our constructed environment. How does a filter enter that story? Does the narrative surrounding this work somehow benefit from the observation that somewhere down the line, it involves a cyan filter to blank out the sky? I don't think so.

The reason I pick up the subject (which is not about you personally in any way), is that I recognize this as a systematic characteristic of the discourse of artistic photography among esp. amateur photographers. That I think is interesting. Not the question of the filter or the development or whatever - but the fact that apparently, for some reason, the question is inescapable on a forum like this one.