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This is the compelling story of the collaboration of the most important husband-and-wife team in the history of photography; a lavishly illustrated critical assessment of their lifelong project of documenting the industrial landscape of the 20th century. Bernd and Hilla Becher's work is at once conceptual art, typological study and topological documentation - it is not only very influential in the field of photography but has the capacity to change the way we look at landscapes and objects that would not ordinarily be described as beautiful.

Becher scholar Susanne Lange, granted access to the photographers' archives and quoting extensively from interviews with them, writes the first sustained analysis and biography of the Bechers' extraordinary partnership. She discusses, among other topics, both the functionalist and aesthetic dimensions of the Bechers' subject matter, their typologising (reminiscent of 19th century naturalists' classificatory schemes) and the anonymous industrial building style favoured by German architects. She argues that industrial building types impose themselves on our consciousness as the cathedral did on that of the Middle Ages, and that the Bechers' photographs - which seem at first glance only to record a vanishing landscape - serve to examine this shaping of our perceptions. Their work provides us with a rare opportunity to see how we see.

Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work, with 53 duotone plates and more than 200 additional illustrations, is the first book to delve deeply into the sources and vision behind the evocative and melancholy beauty of the Bechers' work. It will be of interest to students and aficionados of photography and industrial architecture. And people who like beauty.