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July 27, 2010
The relationship between photography and industrial landscape has a long history. As early as 1959, Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing the disappearing industrial architecture in Germany, and over the next forty years continued to document numerous blast furnaces, water towers, boilers, storage silos and warehouses in Europe and the United States. Apart from being a striking record of an industrial past on the brink of erasure, their work established and consolidated a particular photographic gaze that contemplates the industrial as sheer form.
In Industrial Ruins Spaces, Aesthetics and Materiality Tim Edensor argues for the value and sensuality of the fragment rather the historically reconstructed whole. He remarks:
The disparate fragments, juxtapositions, traces, involuntary memories, inferred meanings, uncanny impressions and peculiar atmospheres cannot be woven into a eloquent narrative. Rather like the nature of a ruin, the stories about it must similarly be constituted out of a jumble of disconnected things, occurrences and sensations. Ruins are disarticulated spaces and language can only capture their characteristics through halting speech. Bits of stories suggest themselves and trail away into silence. As an encapsulated narrative, the telling of the ruin’s tale from beginning to end is impossible, for such a story must be open-ended. Suggestions about the people, their characteristics and the activities they carried out are multiple yet obscure, but despite this, the enigmatic traces that remain, their ghostly presences, invite us to fill in the blanks.
He traces the forgotten forms of collectivity and solidarity, lost skills, ways of behaving and feeling, traces of arcane language, and neglected historical and contemporary forms of social enterprise’.
The imagery and aesthetics of the con- temporary industrial ruin are mainly exploited through the cinema and in some of the marginal realms of popular music, although ruins are also used by contemporary painters, photographers and sculptors, and in some contemporary writing. Representations of industrial ruins are
woven into popular culture, typically serving as stage sets for cinematic portrayals of dystopian futures, spectacular action, dissident identities and nostalgia for the demise of socialities based around heavy industries; all forms of depiction which testify to popular conjectures about the characteristics of the contemporary city and its future.
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