The Bechers & Idris Khan

During the Lecture two lots of work caught my eye, the first from The Bechers and the second from Idris Khan.

Brent and Hilla Becher made photographic typologies as an archive of uniform photograph. The grid structure helps give symmetry, Each object is large and as important as any other. Consistency is key in the photographs of the gas containers, the light, scale and viewpoint all correspond. Their work was often placed in a grid of neutral white frames.

Idris Khan was born in England, 1978, he completed his master in 2004 at the Royal College of Art in London. He works in sculpture, painting and photography.

His ideas are based on a repeating process of creation and deletion, or even adding of new layers while retaining traces of what has gone before. He is well known for his large-scale works in which techniques of layering are used to arrive at what might be considered the essence of an image, and to create something entirely new through repetition and superimposition.

The reason for my interest is his work, is his photography manipulation series called ‘Idris Khan’s Every…. Bernd And Hilla Becher’ series appropriates the Bechers’ imagery and compiles their collections into single super-images. In this piece, multiple images of American-style gabled houses are digitally layered and super-imposed giving the effect of an impressionistic drawing or blurred film still.

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