Student of the famous Bernd Becher, Boris Becker started his career in photography in mid-1980s. Becker was influenced by his predecessors, August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Raenger-Patsch, Bernd and Hila Becher, Stephen Shore, as well as his contemporaries like Jim Dine. These artists share the interest to the everyday and mundane, and to possibilities of its visual representation.

The most numerous of Becker's series includes hundreds of photographs of Second World War bunkers in Germany. Becker is the author of other urban and natural landscape typologies. Staying apart from the traditional historical representation of landscape, Becker is interested by formal structures and color, in the first place. Each of Becker's works is the result of careful conceptual, formal, iconographic decisions. His photographs, always deserted of human presence, look like thoroughly composed and colored models of stage sets.

Becker rarely shows his objects from the point of view of an everyday passer-by. He takes images from a distance which has both technical and conceptual reasons. Unlike Bernd and Hila Bechers' typologies (e.g. their famous water towers) that accentuate the graphic contours, Becker emphasises the sculptural character of the objects. Furthermore, in contradiction to the Bechers' work, Becker is interested in «a sort of camouflage in architecture», to which constructions such as bunkers or residential houses can be an example.

Becker's work can hardly be considered pure documental. Transformation of reality into photographs means for him «revealing sublime structures in the purported commonness of everyday life… resulting from the simultaneousness of objectuality and abstraction and from the tension between a rational and an aesthetic involvement with the image subject.

After materials in the catalogue "Boris Becker. Photographs 1984–2009"

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Organized in collaboration with St.-Petersburg A-Ya Society

With the support of Die Photographische Sammlung SK Stiftung Kultur (Cologne)