Homage to Bernd Becher, 2007. Gelatin silver print, edition 1/6, image: 19 5/8 x 15 5/8 inches (49.8 x 39.7 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee  2007.132. © Idris Khan. Photo: Courtesy of Yvon Lambert, New York

Idris Khan creates densely layered composite photographs by superimposing seminal cultural artifacts such as musical compositions by Beethoven, texts by Nietzsche, or paintings by Caravaggio. While recalling the appropriation strategy of artists like Sherrie Levine who sought to critique the notion of originality by photographing other artists' work, Khan's composites are even more pronouncedly ambivalent in relation to their subjects. On the one hand they enact a kind of destruction by blurring the source materials to the point of almost complete illegibility, but at the same time, they embody—and pay tribute to—the sheer labor and singular vision of the original creators. Khan has repeatedly turned to the work of 20th-century photographers who have themselves explored the notion of the archive, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, a husband-and-wife team known for their decades-long project of documenting various industrial structures, such as water towers and blast furnaces. Khan's condensation of whole bodies of the Bechers' work into single images underscores its obsessive, serial nature. The resulting ghostly palimpsests also suggest a melancholy reminder of the passage of time—one which is especially suitable in this context, given that most of the industrial-era structures the Bechers catalogued were on the brink of extinction. This particular work was made shortly after Bernd Becher's death in 2007.