Bernd and Hilla Beher met as painting students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957 and first collaborated on photographing the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959. Their fascination came from the similar shapes in which the buildings shared and the great deal of attention towards their design. They shot only in overcast weather as to avoid shadow and early in the morning during the spring and autumn months. The subject of their photographs includes barns, water towers, coal tipples, cooling towers, grain elevators, coalbunkers, coke ovens, oil refineries, blast furnaces, gas tanks, storage silos, and warehouses. Apart from photographing in Germany they also took hundreds of photographs of the coal industry in Britain visiting Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham and the Rhondda Valley; in addition they did a tour of North America, touring sites in New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and southern Ontario, depicting a range of industrial structures, from coal breakers to wooden winding towers. In 2002 they were awarded the Erasmus Prize in recognition of their instrumental roles as professors at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 2004, the Bechers received a Hasselblad Award.
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