The cities we live in every day move at a pace that rarely leaves room to pause. Anna-Maria Becher, a Swiss photographer based in Berlin, works against the current, seeking out a kind of stillness in the monolithic buildings she encounters while traveling or in daily life, a stillness that the rest of the urban landscape tends to hide.

In her series Symmetry of Silence, Becher moves close to these structures until they slip out of their context. A curved facade disappears beyond the edge of the frame, becoming a repeating pattern of windows with no apparent end. A rippled concrete roof, dusted with snow, turns into an almost tactile texture, where detail takes over from the whole. A square-plan building, shot from below, becomes a composition of volumes and sharp shadows, almost a geometry exercise. The same operation runs through every shot: stripping the building of its purpose, its use, its function, and returning it as pure form.

This choice stems from a declared fascination with monolithic architecture, that mass of concrete usually glimpsed only in passing, which Anna-Maria Becher instead chooses to approach, isolate, and frame. “By changing the perspective and moving closer, I reduce these environments to their essential rhythms and forms,” the photographer writes about the project. The result is a series of images that read buildings like musical scores, made of pauses, repetitions, and symmetries.

Black and white, in this body of work, isn’t an isolated aesthetic choice but an integral part of the method. By removing color, Becher forces the eye to slow down, to dwell on contrast, on the texture of the concrete, on the direction of the shadows. There’s no chromatic distraction pulling the gaze elsewhere, only the composition remains, in its essential form.

The title of the series, Symmetry of Silence, sums up the operation well, a visual silence achieved through subtraction, which allows these structures to appear as they were meant to be: solid, constant, able to endure time while standing still as everything else, around them, keeps rushing forward.