Bernd & Hilla Becher

"Bernd + Hilla Becher---

"Bernd Becher

Born in 1931, in Siegen, Germany,

Studied painting and lithography and later, typography.

"Hilla (Wobese) Becher)

Born in 1934, in Potsdam, Germany.

Studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she met Bernd Becher.

"The two artists first collaborated in 1959 and they married in 1961. they began working as freelance photographers, concentrating on industrial photography. In 1991, the artists won the leone d’oro award for sculpture at the venice biennale. This was possible because in 1969, the artists had called the architectural subject matter of their photographs, ‘anonymous sculpture’.

"Blast furnaces, cooling towers, gasometers, water towers, lime kilns, compressors, factory halls, head-frames of mine shafts - not the stuff of excitement for most of us. However these anonymous industrial structures have been a fountain of passion for the german spouses bencher who have avidly photographed them for over 40 years.

"Their black-and-white images are all taken in the same clinical manner: a front and profile angle provide a clear and objective documentation of each structure, the building is placed in the centre of the frame and isolated from its environment. The mass of photos are made coherent through categorisation into typologies, revealing the vast diversity of objects all with the same purpose. Non-identical, yet uniform - the idiosyncratic differences and similarities become fascinating.

"The Becher’s describe their subjects as 'buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style.' Presented collectively, their images transform these buildings into objects worthy of interest, if not admiration.

"The typological approach to photography has historic as well as aesthetic significance. we turn to photography because it is a rich means through which to represent - and interpret, reality - and the documentary aspect to the Bechers work has been widely appreciated by engineering and architectural historians.

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"Time

The objective direction of their work was an unusual choice as after the two world wars, documentary style had become impossible. It was of good taste for german artists to ‘ignore history’.

"However the Bechers had some precedents, for example in 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' was proposed by his oeuvre. He arranged these portraits according to social type and occupation - from peasant farmers to circus performers, to prosperous businessmen."

http://www.designboom.com/history/becher.html

Eugene Atget

"French, 1857-1927

 The life and the intention of Eugene Atget are fundamentally unknown to us. A few documented facts 
and a handful of recollections and legends provide a scant outline of the man:

He was born in Libourne, near Bordeaux, in 1857, and worked as a sailor during his youth; from the sea he turned to the stage, with no more than minor success; at forty he quit acting, and after a tentative experiment with painting Atget became a photographer, and began his true life's work.

 "Until his death thirty years later he worked quietly at his calling. To a casual observer he might have seemed a typical commercial photographer of the day. He was not progressive, but worked patiently with techniques that were obsolescent when he adopted them, and very nearly anachronistic by the time of his death. He was little given to experiment in the conventional sense, and less to theorizing. He founded no movement and attracted no circle. He did however make photographs which for purity and intensity of vision have not been bettered.

"Atget's work is unique on two levels. He was the maker of a great visual catalogue of the fruits of French culture, as it survived in and near Paris in the first quarter of this century. He was in addition a photographer of such authority and originality that his work remains a bench mark against which much of the most sophisticated contemporary photography measures itself. Other photographers had been concerned with describing specific facts (documentation), or with exploiting their indivisual sensibilities (self-expression). Atget enconpassed and transcended both approaches when he set himself the task of understanding and interpreting in visual terms a complex, ancient, and living tradition.

 "The pictures that he made in the service of this concept are seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious, and true."

http://www.atgetphotography.com/

Photographs that Influence Opinion

Images provide direct view of the world - originally more difficult to change than painting/sculpture
Preserve history, expess emotions - can make us 'reach inside us to make us feel something' Terrazas
Form of communication, one that can tell stories

Lewis Hine 1974 - 1940

Official photographer for  National Child Labor Committee in America (founded 1904) for 10 years (1908 - 1918)

- Went into mills under cover to photograph children working in order to change laws on child labour in America
- Spoke to the children, as well as the supervisors, to find out what they were doing there (supervisors, most were 'hgelping sister') , their age, wage etc.


Dorothea Lange 1895 - 1965

- Most famous for photographing the effects of the Great Depression and American Dust Bowl of the 1930's.
- Most famous work - Migrant Mother


Don McCullin 1935 -

War Photographer, 1964 - '84, covering Cyprus, Congo, Biafra, Vietman and more
- Showed people living and dieing in war zones, London etc

Phan Kim Phuc, Napalm child - by Nick Ut, Vietnam, completely changed the public view of the Vietnam war, but didn't stop it.

Example:

The most lethal attack by humans on the Democratic Republic of Congo’s endangered mountain gorillas in 30 years left four of the animals dead.

The bodies of three females and one dominant male silverback were found in Virunga National Park, driving up the primate’s death toll to at least seven since the beginning of the year.

The four animals belonged to a group of 12 gorillas known to researchers as the Rugendo family, which has frequently been sighted by tourists.

Emmanuel de Merode, head ofthe conservation group Wildlife Direct, said two of the females had infants with them at the time of the slaughter — a three-year-old who is still missing and a five-month-old gorilla who was found by her older brother and then retrieved by rangers.

The infant was taken into care because she was too young to survive without her mother.

Officials said the “executions” were carried out by a militant group trying to scare wardens out of the park, and not the work of poachers because the carcasses were not taken.

“This area must be immediately secured or we stand to lose an entire population of these animals,” said Deo Kujirakwinja of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Congo program.

In early June, park rangers rescued a two-month-old mountain gorilla found clinging to its dead mother, which had been shot execution-style through the back of its head.

A census conducted in 2004 estimated that 380 gorillas, more than half of the world's population, lived in the national park and surrounding Virunga volcanoes region of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

http://www.earthweek.com/online/ew070803/ew070803i.html

These four silverback Gorilla’s were shot dead illegally. There are only and estimated 700 wild Gorilla’s left in the world.

Virunga National Park covers ground from the Virunga Mountains, to the Rwenzori Mountains, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and is a Unesco World Heritage Site. Many park wardens end up dead.

Corporate logging and agriculture have threatened habitat while the lucrative for locals bush meat trade is also a threat to Gorilla’s and other wild life in the Virunga National Park.

It has to be said the situation in the DRC is tragic for all involved after years of civil war for the 67 million population.

Donations can be made to help prevent the slaughter of Gorillas to theInternational Gorilla Conservation Program.

http://honewatson.com/og/congo-gorilla-massacre/