School of New Objectivity and the way we look at things today.

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers, 1972

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Bernd and Hilla Becher - a husband and wife photographic duo responsible for carrying on German visual tradition of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) into the contemporary moment. The school of Objectivity traces its roots to 1920's Weimar - to the moment of great cultural renaissance and socio-economic flux that occurred in Germany between the World Wars - the time art started taking an Objective perspective at life and human patterns.

Fast forward to 1950's, the same ideology of objectivity fueled a documentary approach practiced by the Becher's as they began photographing tropes of industry - water towers, coal bunkers, industrial facades and factories. The images, on one hand celebrated depicted structures as totems of the industrial age, rendering them as sculptures of modern mechanization and economic recovery, and on the other hand, exposed them as decaying relics of overproduction.

Each image was carefully set up, with meticulous focus paid to consistency and accuracy in vantage point and weather conditions in order to retain similarity in composition and format. Then, put together in a grid, the images exposed homogeneity of industrial mass production and, at the same time, exposed unique sculptural and design qualities of each depicted structure.

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Bernd & Hilla Becher, Winding Towers, 1967-1988, 2003

Bechers photographic perspective became a visual ideology that is known today as Düsseldorf School of photography. Today, their 40-year legacy of 'looking at things' is carried forward by their students whose objective perspectives expanded into portraiture, architecture and documentary photography, altogether propagating the observer's aesthetic that washes over the visual global culture today.

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Andreas Gursky - giving us the elevated and removed perspective.

Teneriffa, Swimming Pool, 1987

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Andreas Gursky

99 Cent, 1999

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Candida Höfer - capturing the Architecture of Absence

Dominikanerkirche Sankt Andreas Düsseldorf II 2011, 2011

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Thomas Ruff - the large scale portrait in the quest for examination of self through others

Portrait Series, ca.1985

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Thomas Struth - observing the observer

Art Institute of Chicago 2, Chicago, 1990