Andrea Robbins and Max Becher

BiographySince 1984, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher have collaborated on projects that use photography, video or digital media to address cross-cultural influence—or, as they put it, “the transportation of place.” In documentary-style color images, Robbins and Becher explore how geographically distant and culturally disparate places come to outwardly resemble each other, following practices such as slavery, colonialism, immigration, tourism, and mass communications. At various times, the artists have investigated subjects such as the remnants of German colonialism in Africa, German fascination with American Indian culture, and the descendants of Black slaves living in a secluded pocket of the Dominican Republic.

In the series Global Village, Becher and Robbins photographed a "discovery center" at Habitat for Humanity's international headquarters in Americus, Georgia, where settings from slums and poor villages around the world are physically replicated in order to raise public awareness and draw donations. These simulated environments, as depicted in pictures like Bedroom with Wash Bowl and School Room, are themselves modeled after photographs and video footage of the original sites. Becher and Robbins adopt different photographic styles from series to series, depending on the particular subject, and the photographs from Global Village are modeled after the work of Farm Security Administration photographers in the 1930s and '40s, who documented the effects of the Great Depression in the United States.

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher graduated from Cooper Union School of Art in New York in 1986, with Robbins continuing her education at Hunter College School of Art, New York (1989) and Becher at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (1989). They have taught in the art departments of The Cooper Union, Rutgers University, and the University of Florida. Their work is in numerous public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain; and Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France.