User:Lucian Wester Annotation Bechers' text by Sarah James

From the book: Photography after conceptual art. Subject, object, mimesis: the aesthetic world of the Bechers’ photography.

Sarah E. James

One of the reasons for the Bechers to photograph the industrial architectural spaces was to preserve it, because they where rapidly disappearing. Their work can be seen as industrial archaeology. But more that an archive is their work about: Objectivity. Their aim was to suppress their own subjectivity as much as possible. And they did this by: ‘This difficult and disciplined form of expression is achieved in the strict adoption of a constant, straight, composition, unchanged over nearly half a century.’ (Sarah James, p.51) For Benjamin H. D. Buchloh this banning out of the subject, both artist and photographed subject (in not one of the photograph made by the becher’s do we see a human being), is understood as a denial of the social. But the Berchers isn’t social passive it is actually fundamentally social.

In their work they created a typological arrangement in which the photographs together form a generic type. ‘The typological arrangement of their photographs enables the viewer to sense the similarities between each and the emergence of a generic type, whilst simultaneously registering all of the differences between the structures and their eccentric characteristics.’ (Sarah James, p.53) By showing their photos in this serial way and creating this generic type the subject, the industrial architecture, becomes more abstract.

Blake Stimson sees the work of the Bechers as a ‘social form’ and places it between works as: the Steichen exhibition Family of Man and Robert Frank’s The Americans. ‘The Bechers’ Photography is presented by Stimson as dislodging earlier modernist political ideals.’ (Sarah James p.57) The work of the Bechers is generalized, universal and structured around an absent ideal. Therefore it: ‘deploys the original Enlightenment promise of aesthetics: the ability to judge without interest.’ (Sara James p.57)

A text by Michael Fried deals more with the ‘philosophical status of the object in their (Bechers) work’ (Sarah James, p.57) Fried takes a close look at the ‘simultaneous relation of resemblance and difference between the diverse structures that they (Bechers) photograph.’ (Sara James p.57) Fried says that by the typology the object photographed become something specific. But ad the same the system allows for comparing the different photos with each other.

‘Both accounts (Stimson and Fried) make clear that the objective character of the Bechers’ photography, and the mode of seeing that their work instigates, enables their project to be both aesthetic and ethical.’ (Sara James p.59)

In the following peaces of text Sarah James uses texts from Theodor W. Adorno to explain the relationship between the years after the war in West Germany and the effect that it had on the Bechers. In the 50th and 60th there was a majority people that tried to deny ideology, an ideology of anti-ideology, because of the horrific things that happened during the second world war. In their work the Bechers tried to reject identity by for instants not only photographing German industry but from all over the world and combining them al together. The work can be both seen as aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, for it isn’t picturesque but it is realistic in the sense that it shows us the beauty of the reality. The modernistic idea of aesthetic is to closely entwined whit ideology and therefore the horrors of the War. The photographs by the Bechers bear the same opposition as the concepts of subject and object (particular and general). Sarah James talks about the idea off mimesis from Adorno to overcome the dominance of the subject over the object. She describes this concept of mimesis as a reflection of the subject to become more objective, as she states about the Bechers work: ‘to express without expressing something’. (Sarah James p.65) ‘If the Bechers’ work gestures towards the general, the ideal object and the absent subject, it constantly interrupts the possibility that they will ever be realized by reactivating their beholder to register difference, to look actively, to systematize.’ (Sarah James p.66) ‘Their photography underlines the fact that there can be no knowledge without a perspective form which it is gained.’ (Sarah James p.67) The constant switching between the general and particular within the Bechers’ work and the idea of redeeming the subject makes us question the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity.