Nomadic Library

Resume

During their 40-year career Bernd and Hilla Becher created an invaluable photographic encyclopedia of industrial structures. Pursuing the concept of typology, they kept focusing on the same subjects over and over again to reveal constants and variations. Basic Forms presents 61 photographs covering the entire range of Becher motifs--water towers, cooling towers, gas tanks and winding towers, blast furnaces, gravel plants, lime kilns, grain elevators and coal bunkers. Basic Forms serves as a kind of manual to Bernd and Hilla Becher's landmark art and aesthetics. Despite the importance of New Documents for posterity, no catalogue was produced at the time. Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand: New Documents, 1967 marks the exhibition's 50th anniversary and presents for the first time, in full-page reproductions, the 94 photographs that hung on the walls of MoMA, freshly contextualized with an abundance of archival material. Essays by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister and photographer and critic Max Kozloff, who originally reviewed the exhibition for The Nation in 1967, shed new light on the enduring significance of the exhibition and on the legacy of these three essential artists.