Bernd Becher’s first paintings represented industrial buildings. He later began photographing the structures and using the images as models. When Bernd and Hilla met in Düsseldorf in 1959, Hilla was working as a photographer and they began working together and using photography as the medium of their works. They married in 1961 and went on to photograph industrial buildings in Germany, France, Belgium, England and the United States. Their work is also an extreme attempt to document a world and a material model in extinction, still bound up with the visual and visible physicality of human labor, as opposed to the virtuality and invisibility of today’s energy system.