Excerpt from David Hopkins's "After Modern Art 1945 - 2000" on Photography and Conceptualism
"Conceptualism provided photography with a long-sought-after centrality within 'Fine Art', but privileged its normally downgraded 'amateur' or 'documentary' modes over its 'pictorialist' attempts to appear 'arty'. The German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher thus utilized a 'documentary' look in their suites of photographs of industrial buildings such as blast furnaces, mine-heads, or cooling towers, unifying individual types within classes via a standardized frontal presentation and low horizon line. They appeared to be creating pseudo-scientific taxonomies in a specifically German photographic tradition extending back to August Sander. However, their play on variations within a category also suggests a parody of the Minimalist interplay between the 'known constant' and the 'experienced variable'.
The Bechers were to have an enormous impact on German photographers such as Thomas Ruff, who, in the late 1980s, subtly nudged their 'documentary' idiom back towards 'pictorialism'. In this way Conceptualism channelled its iconophobia (its disdain for the insistent visual/authorial 'presence' in much Modernist art) back into forms which, while being powerfully 'visual' once more, could nevertheless invoke photography's claims to social 'transparency'."
Excerpt from David Hopkins's "After Modern Art 1945 - 2000" on Photography and Conceptualism
