Bernd and Hilla Becher
German, born 1931 and 1934

Bernd and Hilla Becher met while they were working for an advertising agency in Düsseldorf in the late 1950s. Bernd had trained as a painter and lithographer, and Hilla had studied photography. Working collaboratively, they began to document the often overlooked architecture of industrial sites around Europe and the U.S., taking photographs of structures such as cooling towers, lime kilns, pitheads and silos, many of which were soon to become obsolete.