Waddington Galleries is pleased to present Objective Spaces: Photographers from Germany. Since the 1970s, photography has moved into the mainstream of contemporary art, largely through the recognition given first to Bernd and Hilla Becher, and then to a younger generation of artists that includes Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, all of whom are represented in this exhibition. The black and white photographs of run-down industrial architecture taken by the Bechers in the late 1960s pioneered a new objectivity for a generation of artists confronted by the reality of post-war Europe. When their work began to appear alongside the new Minimal and Conceptual art of the early 1970s, their impersonal approach was seen to have affinities with the serial format, the precision and the detachment of artists such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre. Bernd Becher was also extremely influential as a teacher. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, Höfer, Hütte, Struth, Gursky and Ruff studied photography with Becher at the Staatlichen Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, then one of the most important educational institutions in Germany. Since then, each of these artists has gone on to develop the Bechers' systematic approach to photography, and in doing so has built up a unique portrait of the modern world. In choosing public spaces such as churches, museums and city streets; or places of work such as the factory floor, the stock exchange and the building site; or places of leisure such as the swimming pool, the ski slope or the public park, or by lifting images from the press and the internet, they have confronted subjects we instinctively take for granted. As one commentator has pointed out: 'all these artists seized on photography not as a mechanism to take hundreds or thousands of random pictures, but as an aesthetically oriented medium uniquely able to create an art of cultural and social analysis.' By restricting themselves to a small range of subject matter, and photographing under strictly controlled conditions Bernd and Hilla Becher showed how photography could command its own formal language, its own artistic autonomy. They also demonstrated how the strictest objectivity could act as a powerful commentary about social reality and recent history. The desolation of a landscape filled with abandoned water towers conveys the desolation of a country recovering from terrible defeat. The beauty of these photographs, however, lies in their appeal to aesthetic concerns such as composition and surface, concerns that the younger photographers have pursued through their use of scale, colour, and a range of techniques made possible by modern technology. Candida Höfer (b. 1944) has never adopted the consistent image. Her photographs of public and semi-public spaces such as waiting rooms, hotel lobbies and theatres, from which the people who use them are conspicuously absent, show how even the coolest viewpoint carries an implicit narrative. The nocturnal photographs of Axel Hütte (b. 1951) take on a genre familiar to us from old master painting but their making and their originality depends upon the invention of the digital camera. Thomas Struth (b. 1954) abandoned the serial rigour of the Bechers to explore the act of looking and the experience of being looked at. His observations of strangers in public situations, notably in the series of photographs taken in museums, are as much about a social context as a commentary on ways of seeing. For Andreas Gursky (b. 1955), the fascination of the distant prospect in which incidental detail has the charm of the accidental has moved on to more close-up scenes in which the crowd dramatically fills the frame, as in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) has concentrated on the study of photographic techniques and the manipulation of perception, but his photography also takes on Germany's recent history as well as wider political issues.