Bernd and Hilla Becher

A married German couple who are best known and renown for their body of work 'Typologies'
Typologies is documentation photography of industrial buildings taken over a span of about Forty years and contains around 1,5000 images. The work is presented in as a tableaux of usually around 12 images. Typologies include industrial buildings such as water towers, winding towers, blast furnaces, steel mills, lime kilns, coal bunkers etc.

However it's not the subject matter that I find the Becher's work to be so unique, interesting and inspiring, it's the approach and concept behind it. The way they are presented in this tableaux form puts forward an easy comparison between the buildings- all shot with the same objective point of view angle. At a first glance in some instances, the buildings appear to be the same one repeated over and over again. It's only when you look more closely you see that in fact they are all different buildings, but oddly have the same structure, stance, appearance and construction as each other. You also get to see the differences in them too which you only start to notice after a while. Shot with large medium format cameras the quality and scale are amazing.
The most strange this is that in one tableaux, the individual photographs themselves have been taken from the likes of America, Germany, England, Wales and many other countries from around the world.