Every... Bernd And Hilla Becher Gable Side Houses 2004
Photogrphic print 208 x 160 cm
Since 1959 Bernd and Hilla Becher have been photographing industrial structures that exemplify modernist engineering, such as gas reservoirs and water towers. Their photogrphs are often presented in groups of similar design; their repreated images make these everyday buildings seem stragely imposing and alien. Idris khan's Every... Bernd And Gilla Becher series appropriates the Bechers' imagery and compiles their collections into sing super-images. Inthis piece, multiple images of American-single gabled houses are digitally layered and super-imposed giving the effect of an impressionistic drawing or blurred film still.
Every... Bernd And Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholders 2004
Photographic print 208 x 160cm
The structure in the Bechers' original photographs are almost identical, though in Khan's hands the images' contrast and opacity is adjusted to ensure each layer can be seen and has presence. Though Kahn works in mechanised media and his images are of industrial subjects, their effect is of a soft ethereal energy. They exude a transfixing spiritual quality in their densely compacted details and ghostly outlines. ... Prison Type Gasholders conveys a sense of time depiicted in motion, as if transporting the old building, in its obsolete black and white format, into the extreme future.
Every... Bernd And Hilla Becher Spherical type Gasholders 2004
Photographic print 208 x 160cm
The Bechers took their photos as a means to document a disappearing tradition;
by grouping them according to 'typology' the buildings' designs function like archetypal symbols or an architectural language. Through Khan's translucent aggregations, structures such as ....Spherical Type Gasholders lose their commanding simplicity and rigid formalism and descend into fractured and gestural blurs. Through his photographs Khan compresses the timelind of repetition into indivisible subsuming moments and creates
a poetic mutability from the fixed codes of history.
As I researched history of around bermonsey and the neckinger river, the way Idris Khan's works which layered each photographs can be applied on my drawing of research. lol
