Hilla Becher (1934-2015)

Critics dismissed their large-format, black-and-white photographs when they were first displayed in a museum in the mid-1960s. Hilla, as quoted in an obituary at the Guardian, expressed no unease at this: "The question if this is a work of art is not very interesting for us. Probably it is situated in between the established categories. Anyway, the audience which is interested in art would be the most open-minded and willing to think about it."

Their grids presenting similar typogolical structures – cooling towers, water tanks, blast furnaces, mine heads, etc. – eventually gained appreciation, with architects as much as with artists. Their frontal, no-nonsense photographs can be seen as documents of decaying and vanishing structures, but their "Becher School" approach veils an appreciation of their forms, akin to Le Corbusier's embrace of industrial forms decades earlier. 

Hill met Bernd, who died in 2007, in 1957, when they attended the same art school. They started photographing together two years later and did so for nearly 50 years, creating one of the most distinctive and influential portfolios of photography since the medium was invented.