Teaching Bernd and Hilla Becher: Typologies in Photography
Teaching Bernd and Hilla Becher: Typologies in Photography
Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed water towers, winding gear and gas holders the same way for decades, and the meaning lives in the comparison. This page is for photography and art teachers in grades 9 to 12 who want a typology project that students can actually go out and shoot.
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Bernd and Hilla Becher – Typologies of Photography
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The teaching problem
Why a grid of towers matters
First reaction in most classes is that the pictures are dull. That reaction is correct about any single frame and wrong about the work, which only starts once nine of them hang together and the eye begins moving sideways. Teaching it means teaching a viewing habit students do not arrive with: hold the constants steady, then read the differences. The practical side is harder than it looks. Frontal framing, an overcast sky and a camera raised toward the middle of the structure are not stylistic preferences, they are the conditions that make comparison possible. Students shooting on phones will collect converging verticals and inconsistent light, and their grid collapses into a set of unrelated snapshots unless the rules get agreed before anyone goes outside.
A sequence that works
Building a typology students can shoot
Five lessons from looking to exhibiting. The shooting task is deliberately narrow, because a tight rule set is what makes the final grid readable and what makes the work possible in a single afternoon.
- Read a grid sidewaysStudents list what stays identical across nine Becher frames and what changes. The list becomes the class definition of a typology and stays up on the wall.
- Reverse engineer the rulesFrom evidence in the pictures, the class reconstructs the shooting conditions: camera height, distance, weather, time of day, absence of people, then writes them up as a protocol.
- Choose a repeated formEach student proposes a local type with at least nine examples within walking distance. Proposals get checked for access, safety and whether the examples genuinely vary.
- Shoot, and fight the verticalsField session with the protocol in hand. The lesson covers stepping back, raising the phone toward mid-height and correcting keystone afterward instead of tilting up at the building.
- Sequence, crop and captionUniform crops, a decided order, and a factual caption for each frame giving location and type. Peer critique asks whether the grid holds together as one statement.
Where it goes wrong
Common errors in student typologies
Students confuse consistency with sameness and shoot nine near-identical objects, which leaves nothing to compare. Insist on variety inside one category before they start. The tilt problem comes next: pointing a phone upward at a tower produces converging verticals, and a grid where every subject leans differently reads as sloppiness rather than method. Stepping back and cropping fixes most of it. Sunlight causes the third failure, since shadows move between the first shot and the last and break the set. Overcast days are the friend here. When marking, weight the protocol and its consistent application at least as heavily as any single strong image, because that is where thinking becomes visible.
What's in the download
Inside the files
Editable Word and PowerPoint plus print-ready PDFs, with answer keys throughout.
- Shooting protocol worksheet
- Typology proposal and safety check
- Editable grid layout in PowerPoint
- Caption and label writing sheet
- Critique prompts for the wall
- Rubric weighting method over image
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
What equipment do students need?
Phone cameras are enough, and in some ways better, since everyone is shooting at a similar focal length. What matters is the discipline, not the sensor. A cheap tripod helps with consistent height but is not required if students agree on a body position and hold to it. Editing stays limited to cropping and perspective correction, both of which exist in free phone apps and in software most schools already have.
How much art history background do I need?
Enough to name the Bechers, the industrial subjects they returned to over forty years, and the Dusseldorf photographers who studied with them. The slides carry that context in a form you can read the night before. At heart this is a looking exercise and a shooting task, so a teacher coming from a studio background rather than art history can run it without extra reading.
Does this fit alongside a portfolio requirement?
It sits well with portfolio work that asks for sustained investigation, since a typology produces a body of related images, a stated method and visible evidence of decisions. Students keep the protocol, the rejected frames and the sequencing choices, which is usually what a portfolio wants. The unit claims no alignment with any particular board, and the assessment sheet is editable if yours uses different criteria.
Nine frames, one idea
The whole project fits in three weeks, including a shooting afternoon and a wall display students will argue about properly.
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