• Director(s):

    NEUMANN (STAN)

  • Producer(s):

    ARTE FRANCE, CAMERA LUCIDA PRODUCTIONS

  • Territories:

    Worldwide.

  • Production year:

    2012

  • Language(s):

    German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese

  • Rights:

    TV, DVD, NON-THEATRICAL, INTERNET, VOD

This episode recounts the New Objectivity evolution in photographic practice, the symbol of which is the Dusseldorf school. For the Bechers, photography was documentary in nature.

The pact that linked it to the real from its birth was guaranteed by the technique itself. Today that is no longer the case: photography has moved on from that stage, gaining freedom and losing innocence.

Born in Germany in the 1930s, Bernd Becher and his wife Hilla set out on a strange undertaking: to create a photographic inventory of industrial buildings that were destined to disappear, such as water-towers, silos and blast furnaces.
In the space of 30 years, the "Dusseldorf School", the Bechers and their "pupils" - Candida Höfer, Petra Wünderlich, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Andréas Gursky - were to radically transform photographic practice.

They retained a few key characteristics from the Bechers' teachings: attention to distance, apparent objectivity, and a predilection for straight lines. But each of these photographers reinterpreted this model and developed their own photographic universe. For some, colour became a tool to reinterpret the real, while others remained faithful to black and white. All of them produced very large prints. Photography was no longer a simple document, it was a work in its own right, able to rival the paintings that hung on museum walls.