New York Water Towers

About this Brooklyn Icon

The Brooklyn Museum is commemorating its 200th anniversary by spotlighting 200 standout objects in its encyclopedic collection.

Dotting the urban skyline, New York City’s round, wooden water towers have become iconic. But like much of the industrialized world’s infrastructure, they’re also so familiar that we sometimes take them for granted. Not so for German Conceptual artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who turned their large-format camera on them in the late 1970s, creating a series of stunning, yet spare, black-and-white “anonymous sculpture” photographs of individual water towers. For more than 40 years, the Bechers photographed a wide array of industrial structures, many of them abandoned or deteriorating—factories, bunkers, gas tanks, grain silos, mining plants—in the same austere way. The artists often grouped the images into sets based on subject matter, then displayed them in grids that suggest the method science uses to categorizes its objects of study, urging us to see the structures—and photographs of them—not as beautiful objects but simply as things to be investigated; grids also emphasize a feeling of unyielding order, control, and repetition—even monotony. These series are immediately recognizable and now part of the pantheon of photography.