 Image VII from series: Typologies, 2)
A grid of water towers makes for an unexpected beautiful love winning post for AnOther's Holly Hay
Things look good in a grid. The format adds order, symmetry, while providing a pleasing place of conformity from which to spot the points of difference. For Bernd and Hilla Becher, the artists behind the latest Most Loved post, the grid was a photographic construct that allowed them to display their chosen subjects – water towers, gas tanks, cooling towers – in isolated portrait form, highlighting their stylistic quirks. The results are starkly beautiful – and Loves vote winning for AnOther’s photographic editor Holly Hay.
The Bechers are known as the doyen and doyenne of industrial photography, but despite its stern lines, the grid format is a flexible one, and has been appropriated by a number of artists over the years, some more deliberately than others. Antonio Lopez created linear collations of beautiful women such as Jerry Hall, Jessica Lange and Grace Coddington posing artfully behind a fern, while the arduous mechanics required to create Philippe Halsman’s famous shot of Dalí Automicus are art in themselves when laid out in the contact sheets from the shoot. More formally, there are the compilation works of Patrick Winfield who makes lush meadowscapes using cubes of printed canvas, while one of the highlights of Frieze this year were Ignasi Aballí’s digital prints of images of the sea, taken from the newspaper El Pais. It’s official – fragmentation is beautiful.
Here we speak to Hay about what inspired her to love this industrial mosaic, alongside a gallery of our favourite creative grids.
Why did you love this artwork?
I love that that the photographers present these hard structures through pictures that have such a nice quietness to them.
Where would you keep it if you owned it?
Bathroom.
What is your favourite industrial site to visit?
It sadly closed not so long ago but it was The Wapping Project, an exhibition space and restaurant housed in a old hydraulic power station.
Who is your favourite architect and why?
Le Corbusier because I long to live in his white house and my dad because he's my dad and wonderful.
What is the best piece of creative work you've seen recently?
The latest issue of Toilet Paper magazine.
What's your favourite architecture on film moment?
That house in the woods in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
What are you looking forward to about winter?
Hat options.
What was the last thing you bought?
Nike socks.
