Bernd and Hilla Becher | Industriebauten

 

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Industriebauten

Mönchengladbach, Germany: Städtischen Museum, 1968

19.3 x 15.5cm.

Edition of 55

The third in the series of Stadtisches boxed catalogue/multiple hybrids is the rarest of them all, and the most expensive. The work has an estimated value of over twenty thousand dollars. It originally sold for 15 DM. 

Housed in a facsimile of a Agfa-Gaevert photo-paper box, the works consists of ten gelatine silver prints of the Becher’s "anonymous sculpture” (silos, gas tanks, towers, etc). 

Rather than the high edition sizes of the other boxes (which tend to range from 220 to 660 copies), this was produced in an edition of 55. Each photograph is stamped on the verso (see below) with the couple’s copyright. 

“[Johannes] Cladders’s early 1968 institutional presentation of the Bechers’ celebrated photographs of industrial architecture helped establish them as “conceptual photographers.” The box associated with this exhibition contained ten original silver gelatin prints along with a curatorial text. Although the show, with its meticulous documentary dryness, was presumably not to everyone’s taste, how amazing it must have been for some to be able to view the photography on display and then bring home this beautiful print object including actual photographs.”

- Lucy Ives