Boris BeckerBunker 1984–89

700 Bunkers in more than 40 West German cities! – At once an artist’s book and an archival volume, this publication illuminates an important and also moving aspect of German history. It presents the most diverse types of above-ground bunker, built above all during the Second World War between 1940 and 1944 and brought into focus between 1984 and 1989 by the artist and photographer Boris Becker. When he began his documentary project the era of the Cold War was almost over, and the concrete structures were gradually being released from their civil-defence obligations. More than ever they appeared as alien bodies and uncanny monsters within the townscape; their function seemed to have fallen out of time, and no reasonable person wished to have anything more to do with the murderous ideology they called to mind, the ideology that had brought these buildings into being. “Never again war!” reads a piece of graffiti on one of the bunkers photographed by Boris Becker. Looking at his soberly registering photographic documents, we encounter not only idiosyncratically monstrous concrete structures but also learn the scale of such building activity during the Second World War. Boris Becker photographed some 700 bunkers in well over 40 West German cities. For the series of above-ground bunkers Boris Becker adopted a method related to the conceptual approach of the artist couple Bernd and Hilla Becher. The comparability of the images is as much intended as a neutral point of view and a detailed, authentically appropriate rendering of the structure. The body of images conveys an exemplary view of a subject that was elaborated in many facets within the circle of the so-called Becher School and that represented an essential point of departure for Boris Becker’s further work with the medium of photography. Since then his attention has been devoted to architecture, landscape, objects, and still lifes as well as to the complex central question of the reality behind what is visually perceptible.

Exhibitions:
Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln, 6/9/2019 – 9/2/2020
Saarlandmuseum – Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken, 18/7/2020 – 31/1/2021