An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art offers a probing look at two of the most influential photographers of the postwar era. The Bechers inspired by example: The astringent and impersonal attention they gave to all-but-anonymous buildings helped recover traditions reaching back to early daguerreotypes and to the frontal portraits of their compatriot August Sander (a dozen of whose pre-World War I portraits of typical Germans—"the peasant," "the philosopher," "the revolutionary," and so on—are displayed in an adjacent gallery). They also inspired through their teaching at the state art academy in Düsseldorf, Germany, where their students included such stars of the next generation as Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. Some of Struth's Becher-indebted black-and-white images of Chicago apartment complexes, which make Chicago look eerily like some bleak and joyless corner of East Germany, are on display at MoMA. The museum has also exhibited Gursky's huge, computer-enhanced, and very expensive (earning up to $3.3 million at auction) color photographs of supermarket aisles and futuristic high-rises. These photographs take their provocation from a different aspect of the Bechers' work—their use of gridlike display (as in Gursky's image of Times Square) and their interest in repetition.