that photography was more a "means to an end" to further detail in his sketches rather than its own artistic medium. In the same interview, Hilla maintained that though the couple worked as a team, Bernd was the driving force because he was more of a perfectionist than she was. Bernd died at 75 years old on 22 June 2007 from complications during heart surgery. By that time, their work had achieved worldwide acknowledgements, fascinating other photographers such as Stephen Shore. Their wide influence was also due to their roles as professors at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where some of their students included Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Ruff. The couple, after Hilla's death in 2015, is survived by their only son, Max Becher, and his two children. Work The beginning of their on-going project was part of the “...polemical return to the “straight” aesthetics and social themes of the 1920s and 1930s in response to the postpolitical and postindustrial subjectivist photographic aesthetics that arose in the early postwar period.” (Heckert, Virginia) Most subjects of the works of “...industrial structures-water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, mine heads, grain elevators, and the like-in the late 1950s.” (Heckert, Virginia) Bernd and Hilla Becher's once said about the works, “The idea is to make families of objects,” or, on another occasion, “to create families of motifs [that] become humanized and destroy one another, as in Nature where the older is devoured by the newer.” (Heckert, Virginia) Bernd and Hilla Becher's works are shown as a group to establish a “...movement itself from image to image to image aimed to be the story more than did the sum of the collected parts, regardless of whether it is the movement of the photographer himself or herself, or the camera, or the movement of our own eye as it skips from one photograph to the next.” (Heckert, Virginia). The Becher's wanted to focus on what the images provide to the viewer when viewed together, e.g. an anatomy of the relations between constituent parts. Bernd and Hilla Becher's background with Germany and the inspirations from works of August Sander and company. Concepts such as ‘New Objectivity.’ Carrying forward Bernd and Hilla Becher's work is the machine age photographers, albeit complexly. Some describe it as “industrial archaeology” or “a contribution to the social history of industrial work.” Some criticisms of the concept, that those assumptions are misleading. Bernd and