MINEHEADS.<i> By Bernd and Hilla Becher</i> .<i> The MIT Press: 200 pp., $75</i>

Here is a ravishing work of obsession. For nearly 30 years, Bernd and Hilla Becher, professors at the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf, Germany, have been taking photographs of decaying industrial structures. Styling themselves as “industrial archeologists,” the Bechers view with a melancholy sobriety the detritus of a once-vibrant industrialism much as, in an earlier period, Piranesi regarded the ruins of ancient Rome. Mineheads, in particular, rivet their attention. Ranging over the industrial regions of Western Europe and North America, the Bechers give us in this beautifully produced volume 190 images of mineheads.

The stark black-and-white photographs are unaccompanied by text other than a brief two-page explanatory note. “A minehead,” they write, “stands over the shaft entrance of a mine. It is part of a lift installation, the purpose of which is to deliver the raw materials excavated underground up to the surface. The lift installation required for conveying such raw materials consists of the following: the mine shaft, the shaft cages, the winding engine and the minehead.” The purpose is unvarying, but no two mineheads are alike since every one “is customized and adapted to the given geological, functional and economic requirements of the site.”

Today, little more than 140 years after the earliest of the mineheads were constructed, these austere and mostly rusting and abandoned structures stand as mute sentinels to an era now fast fading. One leafs through the pages of the book and can almost hear the echo of the numberless men who toiled deep underground. But the men are gone, the Earth plundered and emptied of its riches. What remains are tombstones to a vanished civilization. This was the Age of Eiffel, of the engineer, an era (for some) of seemingly endless prosperity. For others, condemned to hack the hard rock in the crust of the Earth itself, it must often have seemed an unending nightmare. Today, the mineheads stand, like so many enigmatic Easter Island monuments, as a kind of elegy to the now broken beauty of the world of our forefathers whose labor and ingenuity are eloquently present in every photograph of this remarkable and moving book.