Imagine a factory, a simple, functional building with a lagged iron structure. Or a historicising building that eclectically cites architectural styles of the past. Or an avant-garde, modernist building in the Bauhaus style, a building that is still celebrated today in professional journals as a perfect example of the architecture of the 1920s, 1920s or 1940s. Or a post-modernist construction of steel and glass inside which iron is no longer turned into steel, in which huge pump stations are no longer manufactured; rather one in which automated, digitally controlled processes run with the final aim of firing out brilliant, high-gloss, delicately resilient carbon parts (for example, for the automobile industry) one after another every second, if you take a good look through the large windows of the lavish architectural structure.

Industrial photographers once laboriously took pictures of this building with a view camera, a large-format camera producing 4x5, 8x10 or 10x12 inch negatives that could be edited and copied until the colour of the factory was right, until it perfectly reproduced what it was meant to symbolise. This might have been the success of a company that had grown over decades, and at a certain point in time (on the occasion of a 50th, 100th or 150th anniversary) wanted to show off what it had achieved, how it had grown, how it had become an important part of the economy of a village, town or region. Industrial photographers photographed the factory from eye level, slightly elevated on ladders or platforms, or even got into light aircraft in order to demonstrate the growth of the factory from above, the many different annexes that had been attached to the original building, the sprawl of the building across the terrain, across the landscape (if the factory still stood outside the city gates), or the inward densification, the interlocking of the building in order to accommodate as many of the new uses as possible. Today, photographers shoot off photos with a camera back that has 40 million pixels, pixels that are so dense that they cover almost the entire image, the entire optical collection area, thus allowing the most accurate, detailed and homogeneous recording possible. This recording can then be edited, corrected or supplemented as required in post-production.

Inside the building they photographed everything imaginable. Every new arrival, every new employee was photographed as a bright young man when he joined, and then as an old man when he retired at 65 and was photographed one last time. In and out, inside and outside, an impressive life span including marriage, children and possibly a gradual rise within the company. So long, at least, as the idea of an occupation was associated with a vocation, life as obligation, the company as the bastion of safety and welfare, i.e. before occupation became job – changeable, uncertain – and salaries and bonuses triumphed over the erstwhile idea of a life-long profession. The workers were photographed wearing blue-collar shirts, the clerical staff in white-collar shirts and the management in white shirts, suits and ties. On celebratory occasions entire departments, the entire workforce was arranged as a group and then photographed – in strict hierarchical order. People were stacked and placed alongside people like bricks. One next to the other, one on top of the other, they became an architectural structure, soft factors reflecting hard factors, one would say today. Modern colour photographs, on the other hand, no longer form architectural structures with people; instead they emphasise a flat hierarchy, a communicative, relaxed, informal atmosphere, and generally conceal the extent to which work and leisure flow and blur into one another.

Industrial photographers also recorded work processes, created manuals that depicted production lines, demonstrated handling techniques and documented materials – steel, aluminium, rubber, glass – as well as various damage to material and manufacturing defects, tasks that are now increasingly performed by automated cameras. Photographers took pictures of accidents, safeguards, safety measures, protective glasses, hygiene measures, open days and official visits by VIPs, politicians and the like. The centre of the photographer’s work, however, was always the product. What the company produced had to be presented in the best light, it had to be thoroughly cleaned, polished with a cloth and then illuminated with huge lights and varnish spray. In order to make it possible to edit, perfect and print the photographs afterwards, the product (e.g. a machine) was screened off from the rest of the factory with white cloths. Finally, in the unsophisticated, still analogue post-production, all the dust particles were removed and retouched, disproportionate contrast balanced, weak contours improved and accentuated until the machine, completely isolated, almost leapt out of the sales brochure into the eye of the beholder, until its effect was so three-dimensional, so vivid, so perfect that it animated and, in combination with its technical performance, impressed potential customers. Here, the factory photographer became the commercial photographer avant la lettre, the propaganda photographer (as advertising was previously known). 

Imagine the same building again, the same factory. Built in 1890 in Turin or Bologna, in Essen or Dortmund, Zurich, Birmingham or Pittsburgh, and then expanded in several stages. Once constructed on the edges of the city, the factory now stood in the middle of the city. In the 1930s it had to lay off a great number of workers, while with the burgeoning boom after the war it began to do business on a large and soon global scale. However, it still often stood in the crossfire of criticism. It was criticised for dirty, untreated wastewater, there were work stoppages in the factories and strikes in front of the factory gates, employee organisations and trade unions organised resistance against the company. None of these events, none of these sentiments were captured by the in-house factory photographers any longer. Press photographers, reportage photographers and socially conscious documentary photographers were now active instead. In their pictures, the number of demonstrators swells from 500 to 5000; we have their pictures to thank for a depiction of the environmental damage caused by the factory until wastewater treatment plants came into operation and until the levels of heavy metals in the water fell. The photographers attempted to get into the factory, but were foiled by guards and entrance checks, and were only eventually able to enter the factory with internal assistance – Lewis Hine famously disguised himself as a priest in order to gain entry to the textile factories of the USA and document illegal child labour in photographs. The photographers were not for one second interested in the bright, shiny machine behind the fence. Rather than photograph from the front, they photographed from the side, at an oblique angle so that every drop of oil, every speck of dust, was visible. In their pictures the halls seem far gloomier than in the pictures of the industrial photographers employed by the company. They no longer represented the ideology of the factory but rather that of the labour movement, the social landscape in which the factory was also embedded. They pursued an entirely different cognitive interest and accordingly produced significantly different imagery. 

Now imagine the factory for a third time. This time photographed from a helicopter, or perhaps by a drone. Together with a town planner, an artist investigates the growth of the urban area, the quarter, the town, and the influence of new industries on both the respective quarters and the population mix. The photographer does not enter this factory, he is not interested in the machines or the worker as an individual; he is much more interested in the system, the interplay of investment and growth, the demarcation between working-class district and upmarket residential area, the gentrification of the once grey industrial quarter. He traces the immediate increase in rental prices once former factory areas become appealing to investors, when vacant factory buildings are transformed into cultural centres. Culture is becoming an important investment marker. In an exhibition, this artist shows a film – the aforementioned drone film – and in front of the projection room hangs a huge map with lots of little photos, which have also been enriched, but with statistics, with figures. The artist is interested in industry, new technology parks as a system, industry and society, industry and climate, industry and progress, new technologies and the behaviour of young people – these are his subjects, the ones that he attempts to represent in complex installations. 

New accents and facets of everything described here, and much more besides, can be seen in the MAST PhotoGallery and in the MAST Collection. Over time, these are developing to become an ever denser, larger and more complex field, a picture of the history of industry, of the future of technology, of reality and the needs of employers and workers, in short, of society and its forms of labour and production, yesterday, today, tomorrow, illuminated from a wide range of perspectives – many more than the three I have described above. The exhibitions of 2016 fit perfectly into this panorama. Jakob Tuggener illustrates and symbolises the theme of the factory and labour in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition A Tile, Some Milk, a Machine and Logistics – Photographs of Emilia-Romagna at Work addresses the changes to a landscape – the region of Emilia-Romagna in Italy – over the past twenty years. It also addresses the changes that the globalisation of the economy has brought with it and the changes in the development towards a service society. Dayanita Singh’s exhibition Museum of Machines, on the other hand, reveals a contemporary artist who has built her own house, her own factory, her own museum – structures that allow her to comprehend and exhibit as part of a discourse on working life (particularly in India) in a large number of photographs. 

 

Jakob Tuggener: Fabrik 

Jakob Tuggener is considered one of the ten most significant industrial pho­tographers in the world. His book Fabrik (the german word for Factory), published in 1943, is a unique photographic essay on the relationship of human beings with the powerful and increasingly threat­ening world of machinery. It is an important milestone in the history of the photograph­ic book, comparable with Brassaïs’s Paris de nuit and Bill Brandt’s The English at Home, both published in the 1930s. Fur­thermore, Tuggener had the great photo­graphic talent of being able to portray the industrial world and the sumptuous society balls with the same intensity. His trademark features are, on the one hand, a penetrating, close-up view of people and objects in the world – so close and attentive that it seems as if he wants to startle them – and on the other hand, his skilful play with light and shadow. His images are worked so strongly out of the darkness, out of the silvery black, that their poetry is al­ways tinged with a considerable amount of expressionistic gravity. Tuggener positioned himself between these two extremes when he stated: “Silk and machines, that is Tuggener.” In reality, he loved both: the wasteful luxury and the dirty work, the enchanting women and the sweaty labourers. For him, they were of equal value and interest.

Despite all these qualities, Jakob Tuggener has remained something of an insider tip, an unknown celebrity, a star among pho­tographers and the specialist scene, maybe due to three main reasons: first, he himself was so stubbornly clear, firm and uncompromising that museums and publishers were unwilling to collaborate with him. Second, a long legal dispute took place after his death, during which his work was virtually shut away from the public. And third, he came from little Switzerland, from Zurich and was not part of the photo­graphic egemony of the United States for example. The history of images continues to be writ­ten by the larger nations, even today. 

Martin Gasser, member of the Jakob Tuggener Foundation, curator of Fotostiftung Schweiz and expert of Jakob Tuggener, wrote for this exhibition: “Jakob Tuggener was simultaneously a photographer, a film-maker and a painter. But above all he saw himself as an artist. Influenced by the German Expressionist films of the 1920s, he developed an artistic style that would become an inspiration for young photographers after the Second World War – for example for Robert Frank, who later caused an enormous stir with his world famous book The Americans. The main themes that Tuggener dealt with throughout his life were work and the worker in the factory, the simple life in the countryside and the glamorous social events of high society. But Tuggener composed the stunning number of more than 60 book maquettes ready to be printed on these themes and others as diverse as locomotives and railways, motor races or Gothic cathedrals. These maquettes or dummies are bound series of images, generally comprising over 100 single- or double-page original photographs each – for which, however, he never found suitable publishers. The only exception appeared in 1943 under the title Fabrik his great “photo epic of technology.”

This book, from which many original prints could be seen in the exhibition at MAST, also proved to be the basis for Tuggener’s reputation as an outstanding photographic artist leading to many participations in notable exhibitions such as The Family of Man in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the International Biennal of Photography in Venice two years later. 

Jakob Tuggener knew the world of the factory quite literally from the inside, having completed training as a technical draughtsman in a large Zurich industrial plant. It was there too, around 1926, where he was introduced to photography and made the first steps towards mastering the darkroom techniques under the guidance of the in-house photographer. However, as a consequence of the economic crisis at the end of the 1920s, Tuggener was dismissed from his job and went on to fulfill his dream of becoming an artist, studying at the Reimann School, a then very well-known school of Art and Design in Berlin.

In 1932, after returning to Switzerland, he began working as a freelance photographer for the MFO, the Oerlikon Machine Factory, in particular for their in-house magazine. Although the company already employed its own factory photographer, he was given the task of recording a kind of photographic interior view of the plant, in order to bridge the gap between the laborers, the office workers and the factory’s directors. Thus, in addition to series of reportage photographs or portraits with titles like Was Arbeiter über ihre Arbeit sagen [What workers say about their work] or Köpfe aus Bureau und Werkstatt  [Portraits from the Offices and the Workshops], Tuggener had by the end of the 1930s also produced subjective, montage-style arrangements of images of unobserved scenes from the everyday life of the factory. For example, the charming series ’s Berti isch z’schbaat cho... [Berti arrived late... ], which shows the in-house errand girl as she sneaks into the factory under the strict gaze of the doorman just before the morning shift. The layout of these picture stories has a distinctly cinematic quality and was totally new and unique magazines at the time.

 

A Tile, some Milk , a Machine and Logistics – Photographs of Emilia-Romagna at Work

In recent decades, Italy’s landscape has undergone unprecedented changes. Researchers believe that the fundamental and historic transformations in habitation patterns in this time have been of such an intensity and breadth that they are comparable with only two other significant phases of metamorphosis in the Italian territory: the Roman colonisation in ancient times and the urbanisation that took place during the Renaissance. These changes have also had an impact on Emilia-Romagna. The city of Bologna and a few surrounding small towns have forced their boundaries expanding into a sprawling and dense suburban area that extends from Bologna across Modena and Reggio Emilia to Parma. The changing dynamics of the economy since the Second World War and later accelerated by globalisation have been the fundamental factor in this development. 

Although we observe this development retrospectively with mistrust and certainly with regret, we know also that we are probably on the cusp of much greater transitions. We read and hear that the latest stages in digitisation will radically change the working world and thus all our lives, our societies, in the coming years. Perhaps so radically that it currently defies comparison, that we will have to reconfigure our notions of work, of society, of social balance entirely. 

With this turbulent future in mind, A Tile, some Milk , a Machine and Logistics – Photographs of Emilia-Romagna at Work was an exhibition that presented a kind of interim view, an interlude. A stocktake of the economic and regional developments in Emilia-Romagna since the turn of the millennium, a kind of state of calm before a potential storm. We started with two photographs by Carlo Valsecchi. They showed Bologna from above, once photographed by day and once by night. Both images were taken from the tower at the heart of Bologna, the Asinelli Tower, looking along the Strada Maggiore. The Strada Maggiore was once part of the ancient roman Via Emilia, which ran from Rimini to Piacenza. Afterwards the visitors passed by images that reference an industrial past. A classic worker portrait by Enrico Pasquali, photographs of machines and equipment of the now no longer extant Minganti factory, and photographs of packing machines, taken by Gabriele Basilico. These hang opposite three black-and-white stills from the film Il Deserto Rosso by Michelangelo Antonioni, which he filmed in Ravenna in 1964. The images from the film reflect the theme of industry and work, of work structures and humans, through the mode of fiction. 

In the first room, we could see two large groups of works by William Guerrieri and two images by Carlo Valsecchi. William Guerrieri shows us in Il Villaggio how a village defined by craft and trade, founded in the 1950s thanks to the first Communist mayor of Modena, has been progressively abandoned and transformed. The activities of the Village was crucial for the industrial development of Modena. After about 60 years, most activities have been exhausted. William Guerrieri’s second piece, The Dairy, which we desplay here on a kind of silvery column, told us the story of a cheese dairy in San Faustino near Rubiera, which continues to develop and modernise, yet still is forced to close its doors because it cannot endure in the increasingly tough market. In contrast to these two groups are the two large format photographs taken by Carlo Valsecchi at Technogym. These, much more, symbolise the world of today, the high-tech world in which we humans are required to shape and harden our bodies. 

Along the path to the right side of the gallery extended the landscape images by Guido Guidi. Their wonderful scenes presented examples from the Emilia-Romagna countryside, interrupted or mixed with photographs of an abandoned factory, by consumers outside a shopping centre, or by the changes in the landscape in a land of construction. These landscape photographs interacted with the series of black-and-white photographs which show Marco Zanta’s Delta del Po, both series displaying the decelerated echo chamber of the Emilia-Romagna economic area. Opposite the series of images by Guido Guidi we showed two very impressive consumer images by Olivo Barbieri that show the progressive changes to the image of the village, of society, deep into the empire of consumerism. 

In the second big room: Paola de Pietri’s series Seccoumidofuoco about the manufacture of ceramics reminds the artist himself of alchemical processes, of nuggets of wisdom and processes from the distant past that allow us to transform disparate materials like clay, sand, feldspar and kaolin into beautiful and durable products. Again, we placed this delicate, very carefully photographed series opposite another two images by Carlo Valsecchi. 

No co-habitation, no economy or development without political discussion, without ideological implications, without the display of power relationships. We showed three pieces of work on this topic, all three on the red “political” tower in the second room: Lewis Baltz, in a long, dense, almost hectic video stream about the economic and political development of Emilia-Romagna, William Guerrieri in a triptych of the cheerful political protests of women on the street, contrasted with Simone Donati’s report on the cult-like commemoration rituals that flood Predappio, the birthplace of Mussolini, twice a year, present this to us clearly.

The history of humanity is full of periods of turmoil, acceleration, even radical change. Ever since the end of the twentieth century the capitalist part of the world appears to be driven by an incredible dynamism. We can barely breathe in our everyday lives, depending on our age, we are now barely capable of comprehending the fundamental changes occurring to the contextual frameworks of our environment. Art, literature and philosophy lost their utopian power, instead they now concern themselves almost exclusively with the diagnosis, analysis of economic, social, media and communications phenomena. Symbolic of this acceleration were the works by Tim Davis, John Gossage, Walter Niedermayr and Bas Princen in the third big room, who all, in their different ways, deal with the construction of the TAV, the high-speed railway line from Turin to Naples, engaging with the theme of this second cut through the landscape of Emilia-Romagna. We were shown, in a most impressive manner, how the earth is broken up and reconstructed using the latest TAV technology, partly on the blue tower in this space. 

Franco Vaccari made the end with his video on the Via Emilia. He talks in there not only about airplanes on the Via Emilia, but he donates roses to the women working on the street. He pays tribute to the growing sextraffic along the street.

 

 

Dayanita Singh: Museum of Machines 

Dayanita Singh is a remarkable personality and a fascinating artist. In the last five years, through exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Museum Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid, as well as with her two participations to the Venice Biennale, she has drawn public attention to a decidedly singular body of work that is extraordinary in a number of ways. 

She started her career in the 1990s with journalistic photo reportage. She has continued to develop her photography ever since and it has gradually become a distinctive form of artistic expression. In collaboration with Gerhard Steidl, her publisher, she invented unique book formats in which her photographs create new narratives and follow new sequences, and acquire concrete form in the book object – each individual project evolving into the most appropriate style of presentation. In the book Privacy, much to the surprise of everyone, she portrayed wealthy India and its interiors, describing for the first time the world of the  middle and upper classes. With the publication of this book, Dayanita Singh distanced herself from the photographic colonialist gaze that is often directed at her country, both from within and from outside its borders; she removed herself from the western-centric double-view that sees on the one hand colourful, bright, exotic India and on the other hand the country of catastrophes, conflicts, and great poverty.

In her book Chairs, she explored her sense of inanimate objects, of spaces, of the silent , still eloquence of things and the latent time in them. The stories (and the history) of individuals, of families, of whole generations, of an ancient culture currently redefining itself after Independence, seem to be engraved in these chairs, tables, cupboards, in the shining polished floors. An evocative, concrete stillness, which rises and falls, expands and contracts, speaks and maintains meaningful silence. In this book, Dayanita Singh reiterates her interest in the histories of people and their objects, tools, machines, her curiosity, which is both anthropological and archaeological in equal measure. 

In Go Away Closer she stepped away from the process of documenting and developed an essayistic view and function in her photography, reworking, in a magical, wordless photo-novella, internal and external life, society and personal history, presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, reality and dream, and shaping them into a new and unique body of image and poetry. The descriptive aspect of photography begins to withdraw, to dissolve, gradually to disappear into the heavens of the possible, into the boundlessness of poetry. The title Go Away Closer expresses the paradox of near and far, of indistinct and clear, formulates a movement, a slow internal and external oscillation. 

The projects and books Sent a letter, Blue Book, Dream Villa, and House of Love demonstrate how Dayanita Singh’s idea of photography is increasingly open. Every photo she takes is like an open book that changes and morphs, its meaning condensing or dissipating according to shifts in interpretation, viewer or context. This increasingly performative dimension in her photography has recently also manifested in her exhibitions. She develops very individual display, presentation and distribution forms; she builds furniture, carts, and folding screens, or, as she likes to call them, mobile, movable “museums” – i.e. structures that continually give her photography a new appearance and presence wherever it goes, thus disclosing new meanings. Her “museums” unfold a game before the eyes of the beholder, a world between an archive and an exhibition, a collection and a presentation, between cabinet and screen. And at the same time, genres combine and overlap: books become exhibitions and exhibitions become books, fanfold pages emerge from books, folding walls extend across the room.

In her exhibition at MAST, Dayanita Singh presented groups of works that all relate to labour, machines, to the production of things, and to the administration and archiving of life. Museum of Machines, Museum of Industrial Kitchen, Office Museum, Museum of Printing Machines, Museum of Men, and File Museum are the titles of some of these groups. In File Museum, for example, Singh photographed the India of rules, of laws, of proceedings and their archiving. Stacks and stacks of history can be found there, piled processes, layers of experience, levels of time. She displays the world of the archive as a living shadow world, a world of paper, of paragraphs, of files, which are bestowed a milky, bluish, pale illumination under the glow of old strip lights and which appear to perish, rot, disintegrate, yet paradoxically seem also to be alive and cultivated. She shows the archives as dusty places full of hope and pain, maintained by individual people, who act as the guardians of this latency, of the margins between present and past, between life and death. If there were not even a glimmer of hope, says the Indian film maker Amar Kanwar, we would not even begin archives. Although they do nothing but pile up the past, archives are always focussed on the future. 

In other series, productive India welcomed us: powerful, smoky factories, thundering machines, operating procedures, workflows open up to we viewers in labyrinthine fashion. In Dayanita Singh’s images, tools, materials, machines appear to come alive, become organisms, creatures, gain a life of their own, a character, with or without humans, with or without workers. A dusty, bleak, greasy world that unfolded before our eyes like a psychological landscape. Or as the author Aveek Sen has expressed it: “As we spend more time with these creatures and contemplate the spaces of encounter they inhabit or conjure up, what begins to rise up within us is, paradoxically, a sense of personality and personhood.”