English

Author: Catalogue entry for George Eastman Museum acquisition of complete time-based media works by William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955). For more information see: https://eastman.org/william-kentridge-donates-his-complete-works-time-based-media-george-eastman-museum

This essay examines the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher as a novel form of bodily figuration. This could seem like an unusual angle from which to approach the Bechers' work considering the seemingly total absence of human figures in their photographic grids of industrial modernity. Their “typologies,” as the call them, would seem to testify to nothing if not the effacement of the human body from the site of work. And beyond being totally bereft of bodies, the Bechers' photographs strike us for their ineluctable stillness, flatness, and pastness. And yet upon closer reading the flatness of the photographs gives way to a dimensionality, stillness gives way to motion, and the edges of the photographs begin to expand in ways that lend to these typologies a dynamic, almost corporeal quality. I argue that this occurs primarily via the interstitial space that separates the photos from one another. The in-between space of these grids thus serves as a space of movement, across which the spectator imagines bodies to be moving and looking. I understand the Bechers’ practice of figuration as a way of dealing with the profound consequences of the Second World War not only on bodies, but on the terms of their representation.