Basic Forms of Industrial Building

There is evidently no end to the awards and honors conferred on the works of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Having won the Golden Lion at the 1990 Venice Biennial, the Kaiserring in Goslar in 1995, and the Erasmus Prize, bestowed on them in Amsterdam in 2002, this autumn they have received the Hasselblad Foundation's "International Award" - a preeminent prize for services to the field of photography. The awards ceremony and the subsequent opening of an exhibition on the œuvre of Bernd and Hilla Becher will take place on November 20, 2004, at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, Sweden.
We are taking this opportunity to publish a special volume of Bernd and Hilla Becher's work, expanding our current series of 13 Becher editions. In the course of over 40 years of artistic endeavor, the Bechers have focused unrelentingly on the same subject matter, and have thus gradually compiled a photographic encyclopedia of industrial buildings and plants which is of unsurpassed importance. Basic Forms of Industrial Buildings brings together 61 photographs that constitute a representative selection from the broad range of subjects chosen by the Bechers in what are characteristic "portraits" of the objects in question.
Subjects include cooling towers, water towers and winding towers, blast furnaces, lime kilns, gravel plants, grain elevators, gas tanks, and even details of the interiors of these industrial edifices.