first began their still-ongoing project of systematically photographing industrial structures – water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, mine heads, grain elevators and the like –in the late 1950s.1 The seemingly objective and scientific character of their project was in part a polemical return to the 'straight' aesthetics and social themes of the 1920s and 1930s in response to the gooey and sentimental subjectivist photographic aesthetics that arose in the early post-war period.
This systematic approach to their work is something which I personally feel a connection with. It is the fact that these structures appear to be uniform, similar yet each was in a different location, with a different historical tie.
ReplyDelete