Düsseldorf School

The Düsseldorf School of Photography refers to several generations of photographers who studied in the first dedicated photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from the mid-1970s onward. Formed around the teaching of Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, it emerged in an art academy already closely aligned with Conceptual and Minimalist concerns. The school aimed to secure photography’s artistic emancipation, asserting it as equal in merit to painting and sculpture. Drawing on the earlier German tradition of New Objectivity, it promoted a disciplined, ostensibly neutral depiction of the built environment as a way to rebuild the medium’s status in the postwar period.

In practice, Düsseldorf School work is marked by sober, documentary-looking images and a notably detached, observational stance. The Bechers’ black-and-white typologies of industrial structures—water towers, pitheads, blast furnaces—used large-format plate cameras on tripods, overcast skies to reduce shadow, frontal viewpoints, and strict development routines to produce extremely sharp, evenly lit prints. Their method encouraged comparative grids and standardized framing to emphasize form and function over individual expression. Later students extended this objective methodology to city streets, public interiors, family portraits, landscapes, and global sites of industry and finance. Color, very large-format exhibition prints, and sophisticated printing—occasionally realized as mural-sized works mounted behind acrylic—became defining strategies, even as some photographers moved to digital capture and others maintained film-based practice.

The coherence of the Düsseldorf School as a single movement is a point of discussion. Some accounts present it less as a unified collective than as a group of photographers who shared training and certain working methods, and whose association has also been shaped by curatorial and commercial framing. Some commentators note both the perceived emotional distance of its cool, methodical style and its potential to stretch the conventions of straight photography, while others emphasize how its links to sculpture, painting, and conceptual art have been taken to extend the medium’s formal possibilities. The term nonetheless generally denotes a cluster of practices that are widely acknowledged as highly influential within contemporary photographic discourse.