Bernd and Hilla Becher’s inadvertent human science

This article reverse-engineers Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies to show that they out-performed their period’s leading brand of human science—human sociobiology—in objectively representing variation in cultural behavior. Though scholars have studied Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photography under a wide variety of aspects—the Holocaust, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Hegelian logic, Wölfflinian formalism, Neue Sachlichkeit, and Theodore Adorno’s dictums of taste, for example—none have wondered how their objectivity fit into the human scientific discourses of their own day. This article compares the Bechers’ photographic method of measuring tool variability to the mathematical method stressed by E.O. Wilson, the ant scientist who took up structural anthropology’s challenge to “see men as if they were ants.” While the Bechers’ typologies of industrial architecture were being adopted as art, Wilson’s sociobiology was adopting mathematics to objectively picture human tool variation. This article shows how the Bechers inadvertently solved a key problem of objectivity in human science when they photographically abstracted each tool family’s parameters into a scientific window onto the landscape of thought. It also shows how and in what circumstances photography at the ground level can be more scientifically objective, precise, and revealing than quantification.