Industrial photography in the classical sense was interesting through to the seventies of the 20th century. Until that time the professional view camera, the tripod, big floodlights and flash systems, complex preparations and a clever retouching technique on both negative and positive print defined industry’s sharp, precise profile. In large industries there were departments with photographers, retouchers and lithographers for making photographic communication and documentation that were as perfect as could be.
In the course of corporate streamlining, proprietor changes, intensified cost control, in the past four decades the visual history of many companies has been thrown away by the container-load and photographic commissions awarded internally to amateur photo clubs and externally to fast-shooting 35mm photographers. The result: visible deterioration – yes, dilution – in industrial photography. The increasing invisibility of the world of production as a consequence of technologization, digitization, and the relocation of heavy industries to distant low-wage countries escalated this image situation still further.
But the industries continued to produce; they evolved, relocated, accelerated. Today they work with new materials, digital controls, robot-assisted production processes through to the use of 3D printers. In parallel with the “cultural revolution” in 1960s and 1970s society, Western industrial society experienced an ongoing “high-tech revolution” with new partnerships. “It is not the productive factors ‘work’ and ‘capital’, not even the productivity of material and fuel resources or of resource information pure and simple that hold the key to social and economic structural change, but the productive factor ‘science and technology’”.1 Economy and society today is changing even faster as a result of the development of information and communication technology, as a result of the Internet. The revolution in information technology has reconnected space and time and thereby starkly altered the space-time ratio of the post-industrial age. “Past societies [...] were primarily space-bound or time-bound. They were held together by territorially-based political and bureaucratic authorities and/or by history and tradition. Industrialism confirmed space in the nation state while replacing the rhythms and tempo of nature with the pacing of the machine. [...] The computer, the symbol of the information age, thinks in nanoseconds, in thousandths of microseconds. Its conjunction with the new communications technology thus brings in a radically new space-time framework for modern society.”2 (Krishan Kumar)
Whereas the old familiar form of the dirty and oily factory began to disappear from Western Europe since the 1980s, a new type of factory has emerged: the showroom. In showrooms, manufacturing processes are performed like theatre plays and serve as companies' exhibition and marketing spaces. In the West, industrial production is deliberately being introduced into cultural life. For example, with the Transparent Factory Building which Volkswagen has set up for production of the Phaeton in Dresden. The factory is turning into a mixture of cultural, ritual and productive location; it is becoming part of a new lifestyle marketing.
We no longer owe the visualization of the new technological development to the conventional industrial photographers, but to artists who deal with these themes. Lewis Baltz, for example, photographed the new technologies very early on, at Toshiba in Japan, at CERN in Geneva, at power stations in France and elsewhere. In retrospect he has put together these images to form a sort of round-up of technological development, summarizing his central themes in around 1990 – Digitized production and communication, control, monitoring and demonstration of power (in his large 12-metre panoramas Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies and Politics of Bacteria).
Henrik Spohler has created four Big Time Documents: with 0/1 Dataflow, Global Soul, In Between and The Third Day, he has substantially and atmospherically, coolly and impressively captured the digital data flow, the spirit of global business, the industrialization of food production and ̶ the new big topic ̶ logistics, the globalized form of erstwhile shipments (with far-flung locations).
Lukas Einsele knows about the Brechtian adage “that a straightforward ‘rendering of reality’ says less than ever about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG factory delivers almost nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slid into the functional.”3 With the addition: “So there is indeed something to be structured, something ‘artificial’, ‘designed’. So art is indeed required as well.” The artificial, the designed according to Einesele is the visualization of a complex network which “plays”, therefore acts and gradually materializes, during construction, during funding, during marketing of the M85 bomb.
Allan Sekula/Noël Burch with their documentary film The Forgotten Place and Sharon Lockhart with her extremely precise and extremely slowed-down travelling/zooming through the corridor of a dockyard, where the workers are just taking their lunch break, thematize various aspects of the wider context “Ocean”, the social and economic conditions of the big ocean shipments which still, archaic and containerized simultaneously, notch up 90 percent of global tonne kilometres.
While sooty, black factory halls full of people are turned into pure-white halls with bright daylight, in which, besides robots and production lines, far more leafy plants than workers can be seen; while, therefore, the factories are emptying, the ships, trains and trails are filling up with migrants. It would be interesting to compare goods flows, capital flows and migration flows accurately with one another. Ad van Denderen in So Blue, So Blue has photographed the climate of migration in the 17 neighbouring states of the Mediterranean; Jim Goldberg in Open See (and specifically in the more than 600-part work Proof) has visualized a feeling of a new beginning, a migratory journey full of hope and desperation, as though the “Earth” is getting alive, as though it were laboriously, slowly setting itself in motion. After that, the world, Europe, will be different.
Mishka Henner and Henk Wildschut, finally, thematize the industrialization of agriculture. Wildschut on the basis of factory farms in Holland, Mishka Henner by means of superimposed sharp satellite images which document the structure of meat production and oil pumping in the USA as a system in control.