German photographer Frank Breuer, a disciple of the Becher’s and propagator of the Düsseldorf aesthetic, captures the sterility of industrial and commercial architecture. Stylistically, his images do not stray far from those of his mentors, choosing to appease rather than challenge the well established German aesthetic
There have been many books that follow in the tradition of the Düsseldorf School of typologies that I just find boring. In fact, I even have a hard time looking through an entire book of the Bechers themselves when it is entirely made up of one of their subjects. Like many other genres of photography, their conceptual tendencies seemed to lead to a whole generation of photographers that would simply pick their typology and plug in the information. Of course one needs to make interesting photographs but the makers seem to say, “I’m going to photograph X” and then their job is to photograph “X” 200 times. Within this framework is common for these bodies of work to be a bit more interesting conceptually than visually which is why I was surprised to like Frank Breuer’s book Poles as much as I do.
