Industrial-Strength Art: The photographers who found beauty in the factory

(Christopher Benfey, Slate) - Bernd and Hilla Becher, a husband-and-wife team from Germany (he from the West and she from the East), spent more than 40 years patiently tracking down no-frills industrial buildings in Europe and the United States and photographing each one in the same deadpan, black-and-white format. It was an enormous and obsessive project, eventually including many thousands of images, but it was abruptly interrupted in June 2007 by the unexpected death of Bernd Becher after heart surgery.
Since the Bechers, unlike many couples, shared every aspect of their working lives—and can therefore reasonably be considered a single artist—it is unclear what the current status of their project is (whether Hilla, for example, will continue to take photographs in the same mode), but in an obvious sense, the work of "Bernd and Hilla Becher" can now be considered complete. Continued