In their forty years of artistic endeavour, the Bechers have focused unrelentingly on the same subject matter, and have gradually compiled a photographic encyclopaedia of industrial buildings and plants.
This book brings together sixty-one photographs that constitute a representative selection from the broad range of subjects chosen by the Bechers in what are characteristic 'portraits' of the objects in question. Subjects include cooling towers, water towers and winding towers, blast furnaces, lime kilns, gravel plants, grain elevators, gas tanks, and details of the interiors of these industrial edifices. Each appears as monumental symbols of their own history, with all the stylistic diversity and complexity of great works of architecture.
