As I make more books and things (collections of postcards are in the works), I increasingly think of photos in series. I don’t deny the power of a single, amazing photograph, but there is a value in seeing photographs as part of a collection of related images. I have long appreciated the powerful work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Series can be as short as a pair of photos, a diptych, or much longer series, such as 52/4.
From a recent trip to the Great Sand Dunes I have a number of nice, single photos as well as a number of photos that work well as short series. The images are fine on their own, but work really well as a triptych.
Diptychs (and triptychs). Thinking about photos in groups: twos, threes, and fours, maybe more (the grids of photos by the Bernd & Hilla Becher, e.g.). How does pairing photos change them? How does looking for pairs alter the process of photographing? I don’t know, but I like to think about it.
I find something compelling about Bernd and Hilla Becher’s book, Typologies of Industrial Buildings. Juxtaposing numerous individual examples of industrial structures highlights their similarities and their differences. It also draws attention to often overlooked or ignored architecture, encouraging us to see design and aesthetic choices, to view these utilitarian structures as art. While each of their photographs, taken alone, is interesting, when taken together they are a sort of conceptual art, as well as a study in form.
Infrastructure #220621.1
The Bechers’ work lies behind my interest in otherwise overlooked infrastructure. Windmills, manhole covers, utility poles, high tension towers, bridge supports. These are all opportunities to focus on the mundane in an effort to find the interesting.
Infrastructure #220621.2
Manhole covers. Lots of people have found manhole covers interesting. Some people use manhole covers to make great prints. Other people have spent time photographing them. But what happens when we consider them in large numbers? Can we produce a typology of manhole covers? Sewer covers, storm drain covers, utility covers, and communications covers. In the process, can we see the traces of their histories? The imperfections, individual marks of fabrication, scars, and design quirks of individual foundries. Do they also reveal the history of industry, consolidation, and shipping? Local foundry names giving way to larger, regional foundries, which are then replaced foundries in foreign countries.
Infrastructure #220621.3
I don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing here. But maybe there is.
Singular photographs are fragments, or perhaps illustrations waiting for a story to give them context. But series of photographs seem to prompt a different kind of reflection. Collect together enough individual fragments and arrange them in some order, and the begin to reveal something you can’t see when looking at just one. The photographer engages in a sort of Aristotelian project, seeking out as many discrete examples of something in its natural setting in order to discern the features and characteristics each shares. Or the ways that each interacts with, shapes and is shaped by, that natural environment. In this way, photography becomes a project of natural history.
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The intentional and sustained effort to take a number of related photos and to assemble them into a meaningful series encourages reflection and a sort of tranquility. And, in the end, says as much about the object studied, e.g., windmills, as it says about the photographer. But then, that’s true of any natural history endeavor.
Linger for a moment to think about ruin and decay. What if ruin is not the result of neglect but is, instead, an expression of value? Ruin and decay are not accidents but choices, as is our fascination with them. The one, perhaps, creates the other.
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We live and wander amongst ruin. Ruin dots the landscape. We work around ruin, seem to preserve ruin.
There by itself, in the weak sun that fall afternoon, The Aermotor windmill turned slowly in the breeze, marking time with a rhythmic scraping of the rotating axle. It was a sort of sentinel, standing watch over a barbed wired fence and wide open range. At some point, this windmill probably served some purpose, but what I can only guess. Like so many windmills, vestiges of past hopes and dreams, this one sentenced to a lone existence, forever spinning in the wind to no effect.
A rhythmic grating sound as the windmill rotated slowly in the hot breeze.
Every time I see one one of these windmills I recall those lines:
…
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
For years I couldn’t imagine walking into an office building or a bank or department store or any other public space and not seeing an ashtray. Not because I noticed them, but because they were ubiquitous. Standing ashtrays just inside the entry doors, ashtrays on counters next to the bank teller, ashtrays attached to the wall between sinks in the bathroom. Fancy ashtrays always adorned the executive’s desk, often a tendril of smoke wafting up from the half-finished cigarette lingering in one of the depressions along the edge. Today ashtrays have been reduced to decor in pseudo-nostalgic TV shows such as “Mad Men” that receive accolades for their retro-aesthetic.
As somebody who has never smoked, I don’t miss the days when the haze of smoke clouded offices and every restaurant reeked of burning tobacco. But I do miss the design and aesthetic of ashtrays (I find the aesthetics of vaping uninteresting). And I wonder what other furniture of our lives is disappearing as it is replaced by a new aesthetic.
Kanorado’s Grain Elevator.
Wandering across a couple states recently, I paused to admire grain elevators, so many of them interestingly different in small ways — a handful of tall, thin silos conjoined rising up from the plain, faded and flaking whitewash on the outside, “Co-Op” often painted near the top along with the community’s name, an array of elevators and conveyor belts and other mechanics attached to the outsides, train tracks running alongside some. Increasingly the grain elevator that seems so iconic are being replaced by squat, corrugated metal silos. These new grain elevators are, no doubt, more efficient or cost effective or something. But they lack something. Their homogeneity arising from their mass and therefore uniform production, their dull gray corrugated exteriors, their squat, uninteresting shapes all augur for an aesthetically boring future.
Birds and Grain.
I am not the first to pause on grain elevators. The pioneering work of Bernd and Hilla Becher is outstanding here. They became fascinated with what they called “nomadic architecture,” buildings that might last a century before disappearing. Their photographs of, inter alia, grain elevators, blast furnaces, and water towers reminds us to pause and appreciate the design of even the most mundane and utilitarian buildings and objects before they disappear.
