# Düsseldorf School of Photography

> Colour photographs of buildings, museum halls, libraries, crowds, landscapes and faces, taken square-on from a distance with a view camera and printed huge, often face-mounted to acrylic, so the wall-sized print shows more detail than the eye. The light is flat and even, the people small or expressionless, the viewpoint often raised. The Bechers' deadpan typology turned into colour 'pictures' the size of paintings, sometimes digitally assembled.

- Period: 1976–present
- Where it began: Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
- Kind: Staged & conceptual
- Also called: Becher School, Becher class, Düsseldorfer Photoschule
- Page: https://lumogeny.com/styles/dusseldorf-school/

## How the look is made

- Stand square-on and well back, raise the camera if you must, and keep every vertical upright.
- Use flat, even light and keep everything sharp from front to back.
- Show no emotion: subjects face the lens or are too small to read; let the structure of the place speak.
- Work in series: the same kind of room, building or face photographed the same way again and again.
- Print in colour and very large, so detail and scale become the experience of the picture.

## How it is lit

- Flat overcast daylight with no fill and no flash.
- The available light of an empty interior, with an exposure long enough to blur anyone who moves.
- Even studio flash on a pale plain backdrop for frontal head-and-shoulder portraits.

### The rendered set-up

Two matched flash softboxes either side of the lens and two more on a pale backdrop, flat and even, the head square-on. Rendered in Blender Cycles on a synthetic clay figure or still life, with the lights exactly where the plan on the page puts them.

### A light plan from its choices (schematic)

- Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.

## Camera settings

24–60 mm · f/16–f/45 · 1/125 s–1 min · ISO 25–100 (on 5x7), inferred. Normal or slightly wide lenses and f/16–f/45 are inferred.

## Directing people

Portrait sitters face the lens square-on, head and shoulders, shoulders level, eyes straight into the lens, mouth closed and unsmiling, no gesture, held still like a passport photograph. Elsewhere people are small visitors, workers or crowds seen from far off, walking, looking at things or turned away, never directed into a story.

## Styling

Places are shown as found, with nothing dressed or moved for the camera. Portrait sitters come in their own everyday clothes, with no make-up and their hair as it is, against a pale, plain backdrop; the order in the picture comes from the place or the series, not from props.

## Before you shoot it

The school's members are living artists with signature works: never prompt by their names or recreate a specific picture such as Rhein II or 99 Cent; describe the choices instead.

## Photographs

- Thomas Struth, Galleria dell'Accademia 1, Venice, 1992. Collection SFMOMA. © Thomas Struth. In copyright, linked: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/94.312/
- Andreas Gursky, Köln, Zoobrücke, 1988. Collection SFMOMA. © Andreas Gursky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery and Sprüth Magers. In copyright, linked: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/90.264/
- Thomas Ruff, Porträt (I. Graw), 1989. Collection SFMOMA. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. In copyright, linked: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2003.204/
- Andreas Gursky, The Rhine II, 1999. Tate. © Andreas Gursky. In copyright, linked: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gursky-the-rhine-ii-p78372

## Sources

- Düsseldorf School of Photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorf_School_of_Photography (Becher professorship 1976–1996, student list, 1988 Johnen & Schöttle show, Städel 2017 survey, Neue Sachlichkeit lineage, Bechers in New Topographics)
- Düsseldorfer Photoschule, Wikipedia (de): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorfer_Photoschule (professorship dates, wider student list, 'objectifying view from a certain distance', Sander, Blossfeldt and Renger-Patzsch as forerunners)
- Dusseldorf School of Photography, Tate art term: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/dusseldorf-school-photography (Gursky, Höfer, Hütte, Ruff, Struth; New Objectivity tradition; documentary method with new technical possibilities)
- Andreas Gursky, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gursky (studied with Becher 1981–87, high vantage points, digital editing since the 1990s, prints up to six by ten feet)
- Thomas Ruff, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ruff (studied 1977–85; Porträts 1981–85 on 9 × 12 cm negatives with flash, even light, neutral expressions; printed up to 210 × 165 cm from 1986; Häuser digitally edited)
- Candida Höfer, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida_Höfer (empty public interiors, frontal or diagonal, elevated position; colour from 1979)
- Rhein II, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhein_II (1999; dog walkers and a factory removed digitally; Tate and MoMA prints)
- SFMOMA collection records for Gursky's Köln, Zoobrücke (90.264) and 99 Cent (FC.714), Struth's Galleria dell'Accademia 1, Venice (94.312) and Ruff's Porträt (I. Graw) (2003.204): https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/94.312/ (media: chromogenic prints, several face-mounted to acrylic; dates; sizes)
- Andreas Gursky in Conversation with Jeff Wall, in Andreas Gursky (Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2018), PDF at andreasgursky.com: https://www.andreasgursky.com/en/downloads/2018/conversation-wall-and-gursky ('The Plaubel cameras ... were used by the Becher Class [including Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth] up until the 2000s'; 'I created many of my early landscapes with my father's cumbersome old Linhof'; the Bechers' 'very precisely exposed 13x18 centimetre black-and-white negative, photographed from a slightly elevated perspective')
- Andreas Gursky: Images, Tate Liverpool, 1 July – 28 August 1995: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/andreas-gursky-images ('This gives him a 4 x 5 inch negative from which he produces his crisply detailed colour prints')
- Seeing Is Believing, Newsweek, 18 March 2001: https://www.newsweek.com/seeing-believing-148639 (Gursky: 'I always work with five-by-seven-inch-plate camera')
- Long Shot Close Up: Andreas Gursky, Pars Media film page: https://www.parsmedia.com/films/long-shot-close-up-andreas-gursky ('Gursky uses 100 ASA Fuji film in two large format Linhof cameras that are positioned side by side, one with a slight wide angle lens, one with a standard lens', photographing Arirang in Pyongyang)
- Thomas Ruff, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ruff (Porträts of 1981–85 'taken with a 9 × 12 cm negative and, because of the use of a flash, without any motion blur')
- Candida Höfer photographer profile, Wallpaper*: https://www.wallpaper.com/art/candida-hofer-photographer-profile (since the 1970s 'with one assistant, a large-format camera, and nothing more – not even lighting equipment', using the existing light)
- Bernd and Hilla Becher, Wikipedia, citing Jeff L. Rosenheim, Bernd & Hilla Becher (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernd_and_Hilla_Becher (Plaubel Peco 13×18 cm monorail camera; lenses from 90 to 600 mm; 25 ASA sheet film from about 1970; exposures 'from 10 seconds to a minute')

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