Skip to content
Home/ Grain Elevators
Grain Elevators

Grain Elevators

No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780262026062 MIT Press

These photographs of grain elevators in America, Germany, Belgium, and France are a major addition to the Bechers' ongoing documentation of the vanishing buildings that once defined the industrial landscape of Europe and America.

Bernd and Hilla Becher's almost fifty-year collaboration constitutes the most important project in objective and conceptual photography today. With this volume, grain elevators join the list of building types documented by the Bechers in their book-length studies: water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, oil tanks, mineheads, frame houses, and cooling towers. Grain elevators are towering structures in the flat, vast landscape of the world's granaries. Providing a fast and efficient method of loading and unloading grain to keep pace with the industrial production methods of the nineteenth century, they made possible a tremendous increase in the trafficking and processing of grain. Scooping, pouring, and spitting, they both illustrated and inspired Le Corbusier's idea of buildings as functioning machines. Monumental, essential, and visually arresting, grain elevators belong as much to the American imagination and landscape as to the European. The photographs of grain elevators in this volume were taken in Germany, Belgium, France, and America. But the specificity of time and place is erased in these photographs; the monolithic structures evoke the agricultural prosperity of a vanished era and the vacancy that replaces it today.

About the author

Product details

BrandMIT Press
Pub dateDec 1, 2006
ISBN-100262026066
ISBN-139780262026062
Pages216
LanguageEnglish
Dimensions11.69 × 10.94 × 1.15 in
Weight5 lb
Last updated 2026-09-10 21:59
$59.18 $84.95 30% off
You save $25.77 · list price $84.95
In stock soon — order now to reserve your copy
Delivery by Thursday, September 24, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Individual Photographers - General
See all
Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement
Eadweard Muybridge, one of the great pioneer-innovators of the 19th century, is a familiar figure to students of art history, photography, and cinema. Best known for the photographs of horses and other animals in motion that he made in the 1870s and '80s, Muybridge was the first person to use photography to freeze rapid action for analysis and study. He devised a method for photographing episodes of behavior using a series of cameras, producing some of the most famous sequential photographs ever made. These pictures, the first successful photographs of rapidly moving subjects, revolutionized expectations of what photography could reveal about the natural world, and ultimately led to the invention of the motion picture in the mid-1890s. <p/> <em>Time Stands Still</em> is the catalogue that accompanies a major exhibition celebrating Muybridge's fascinating work. Though the instantaneous photography movement stands as a crucial event in the progression of photography to motion pictures, this exhibition represents the first major organized treatment of the subject. Opening in spring 2003 at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University and touring through 2004, it combines an examination of the artist's career in motion photography with a survey of early attempts to photograph moving subjects. Guest curator Phillip Prodger is the primary author of the catalogue, but the book also includes a valuable essay covering cinema's earliest experiments by Tom Gunning, an acknowledged expert on early film from the University of Chicago. The exhibition will display Muybridge's zoopraxiscope and other equipment, drawings, ephemera, and photographs made from the invention of photography in the 1830s to the end of Muybridge's career, which culminated with the publication of his encyclopedic work, <em>Animal Locomotion</em>, in 1887. <p/> The photographs and objects are drawn largely from the collection of the Cantor Center and are supplemented with a selection of stop-action photographs from other private and public collections. Among those represented will be the work of Talbot, Rejlander, Maray, Eakins, Edison, the Lumiere Frères, and others.
$31.99
George Hunter's Canada: Iconic Images from Canada's Most Prolific Photographer
<p> One of three new titles in the Firefly Books-National Film Board of Canada partnership. </p><p> <i>"My mission is to show Canadians, and the world, a little of our country. The more they see something of Canada's grandeur and diversity of its people, the more they will appreciate it. I will not rest a minute until my mission is accomplished."</i> -- George Hunter, photographer </p><p> Nobody took more photos of 20th-century Canada than George Hunter. His photos are in atlases, textbooks, encyclopedias and magazines. They're in galleries, museums and public archives, on old postage stamps and currency. </p><p> Despite a 70-year career that saw Hunter cross Canada more than 100 times on photographic expeditions, he never achieved widespread fame or critical acclaim. Mostly this is because Hunter was a photographer for hire to commercial entities and the government. His assignments were, ultimately, to document progress. </p><p> Hunter's catalogue represents a chronology of postwar Canada, beginning with horse-drawn hay wagons and ending with modern semi trailers on multi-lane highways. He captured portraits of Canadians at work, and also became a pilot to further his career. His aerial shots of billowing smokestacks, open-pit mines, newly minted expressways and vast log booms dominate his portfolio, which to modern eyes is equal parts majestic and nostalgic. His is a portrait of a young country maturing into an industrial force&#x3b; a landscape as shaped by the people. </p><p> For information on the National Film Board of Canada visit www.nfb.ca. </p>
$14.13