Archives are vast, silent leviathans. They only awake and begin to speak when you ask them a question, when you bring them to life by looking at them in certain perspectives, with the vitality of interest – that is to say, when their potential unfolds in the present, when they are activated. Collections are not much different, even if the act of collecting is guided by a specific intention, a concept, a certain question from the start. Only when eyes and ideas draw from the image reservoir of the past, only when connections are made, when past and present, production and consumption, human and machine, factory and society are conceptually linked, do the sparks fly and the archives and collections begin to tell their stories, offering up their treasure troves of information and electrifying us with the worlds of imagery contained within them.

Every archive has its own history, its own specific system made up of order and disorder – and so obeys its own unique structural rules. Yet within these rules, photographs – nearly everywhere – play a primarily descriptive role. In other words: a photograph portrays a given subject, it represents it, shows the event in question, and was taken by this or that photographer in a particular context, or it’s an anonymous shot, by an unknown individual. That’s all. This is what we call a strictly descriptive, denotative, point of view in photography. What is easily forgotten in this approach, however, is the aesthetic impact of photography, its pictorial power, its visual evocativeness, the deep black in the silver layer covering the paper, the massiveness of oversize formats, the blinding brightness of the colours. Photographs can do much more than simply denote or name. They develop an incisive, radiant power, get under the skin; that is to say, they also affect us emotionally, thus conveying not just one, but two, three, four different messages at once. These are connotative or resonant messages, which can be metaphorically or symbolically loaded with meaning and must frequently be read and interpreted emblematically.

Or there are those messages that, like music, affect our emotional existence directly and immediately. Sometimes the emotional force of a photograph fills us and saturates us much more intensively than its descriptive content could; sometimes the descriptive power on the one hand and the aesthetic force on the other, duel with each other, two contradictory sides, thereby eliciting a sense of uncertainty and uneasiness in the viewer. But if the content, reference, denotation are complemented by emotional intensity, with pictorial strength, then photography acquires and emanates an incomparable power.

These supplementary powers of photography are what the exhibition “The Power of Images – MAST Collection: an iconic selection of photographs on industry and work” wants to trace. It attempts to expose them, implement them, create an interplay of photographs in which they play with or against each other, so developing a new, richer, more ambiguous narrative form. The exhibition is a celebration of visions, a pictorial epic, a dance of images from the world of industry which parade before our eyes, a visual abundance of insights into heavy manufacturing, machine industry, digitalisation, and throw-away society.

The perspectives of over sixty photographers guide us through a variety of spaces, zones, areas, through the world of industry and work, informing us, teaching us, and permitting us to enter emotionally into these realms. Before our eyes, they develop a new way of seeing, a play of opposites, of the similar, of duplication, of fore- and backgrounds, of the heavy and the light, of  saturation and void, of the energetic, the euphoric – and, on the other hand, of the melancholic, the sad, the unfathomable in the extraordinarily rich visual world of things, of work, industry and technology in our society.

For example, we are immersed in metal here, or more precisely: in images of metal with the works of Germaine Krull, Berenice Abbott, Nino Migliori, Takashi Kijima, and Kiyoshi Niimaya. We experience in their images the malleability and weight of this material, the darkness in processing, the light, the brilliance in its result, we trace its stability, flexibility, tensile force, we see how it becomes “distorted metal sheets” (that’s precisely the title of a photo by Niimaya) through compression and crushing. Metal as a true bridge-builder’s material, in the most authentic and literal sense, as we can see in the great series by Germaine Krull. Metal as the key material for a certain industrial age. And then sheet metal, steel, plastics, rubber tyres, white plasterwork, and – in the photos by Pietro Donzelli – tar, tar barrels, tarry puddles in abandoned industrial lands.

Remy Markowitsch’s large, 25-piece work was created in conjunction with an exhibition that took as its focus the Volkswagen plants and the town of Wolfsburg, which developed in concert with and dependent on that same. His work transforms the power of motors into a Psychomotor, as he calls his work, a form of erotic mechanics, all depending on the eye of the beholder. In the work of Cesar Domela, machines become inscrutable, surreal creatures, steam accumulators transform themselves into thickets, living organisms, condensed city forms. They glow, puff, creep, steam – or quietly tick and smoke away.

Closed, mysterious forms, ruptured surfaces, patterns that are drawn across the image surface similarly, but with an entirely different meaning – an  organised swarm of heavily laden mine labourers, conjoined, intertwining shafts in a chemicals factory, a cooling tank in a nuclear power plant are connected through the similarity of their form and thus shape a field of stark contrasts. A blast furnace by Max Alpert, a chimney reaching up into the sky by Jakob Tuggener, cooling towers and missiles symbolise the enduring drive for more, to reach up, ever higher, for progress, for the conquest of the world. Energy will become more focused, more vigorous, more powerful, until it explodes, discharging itself voluntarily, planned or by force, profitably or destructively. Railway, automobile, airship, aeroplane, missiles, bombs: they are all invented, developed, planned, constructed, produced and deployed – for good and for bad.

The large photograph Morning Shift Umit 631 by Jules Spinatsch takes us via computer operated means through an eight-hour shift in the production line of John Deere tractors. A whole shift drawn together, 800 photographic shots condensed into a single image. Finally, the tractors are varnished and clad, the chassis is put on the tractor like a garment. In the factory jargon, this shift is called “the wedding shift as the original title suggest (Hochzeit meaning “wedding” in German).”

Simone Demandt leads us the machines of the night as they, both mysterious and meaningful, continue running in their laboratories, as they continue measuring, ticking, even when nobody is present. The photographs of the Chicago board of trade by Beate Geissler/Oliver Sann also narrate the exhaustion after a battle fought as if it were an endless progression, non-stop, perpetual, insatiable, inescapable. Images of spaces provide the scaffolding of the exhibition, guide visitors and their gaze – they are the signposts on the path through the rooms. Along the halls, for example, of the Hot Rolling Mill, Thyssenkrupp Steel, Duisburg by Thomas Struth or the Alto Rabagão power station: busbar shaft or through appliances such as the Interior of Large Space Simulator vacuum chamber by Edgar Martins,the Room Sequence 244 by Walter Niedermayr, through to the white, cool work areas of Henrik Spohler’s series “Global Soul,” which thematises the intangibility, the invisibility of digital data flows. Finally, after a passage of brilliant product photographs by Peter Keetman and Franz Lazi, we end up in High noon, Dhaka dump, Bangladesh, from Jim Goldberg’s series “Open See,” a wide, open plain full of refuse, on which a “guard” conscientiously watches over the separation of material waste and animal cadavers. Hiroko Komatsu encounters mass production with masses of gelatin silver prints. With these, she builds walk-in image temples or image walls, like a kind performance, in which on the one hand she constructs architecture with images and on the other, through architecture in unspecified stages of construction or deconstruction, through factory plants, tools, refuse piles, she generates an atmosphere of catastrophe, of the abyss, of turmoil. The installations of building and construction materials of all kinds turns into an existential, physical, three-dimensional conceptual space, a “Sanitary Bio-Preservation,” a melancholy shrine to the decay of things. Everything, no matter how skilfully it is produced, is ineluctably destined for decay. Photography also experienced a decline, when processes retrospectively termed analogue started to vanish. Experts could see the upcoming of “electronic photography,” as it was called initially, coming, but the opinion was that it could never replace analogue photography, that it was at most a flash in the pan or would simply complement the silver grain of analogue photography. In 1988, Andy Grundberg, the photography critic of the New York Times, was still able to write: “... it is more likely that electronic imaging will function like Edwin Land’s Polaroid process, as a supplement to the community of image-making-media. Even the head of Eastman Kodak’s electronics division – a recently established corporate entity designed to take the future’s high ground – believes that traditional photography’s ‘hard copy’ role will not be usurped by electronics. ... We see electronic imaging as enhancing silver gelatin photography, not replacing it.” Reality quickly checked this opinion. We know that the misjudgement by the head of Eastman Kodak’s electronics division ushered in the decline of Kodak. Today, principally due to this error, the company is less than 10% of its previous size. Catherine Leutenegger visualises this decline in her colour images full of empty, abandoned rooms and parking lots. Even the greatest innovation cannot provide protection against decline. People, workers, factory employees, managers also intrude into the epic of imagery. Yet rarely with the rooms in which they stand or associated with machines or with tools, but instead, like the famous portraits in the series “In the American West” by Richard Avedon, isolated, singled out and placed alone in the image space, placed unprotected and vulnerable in front of the camera. Who are we, where are we going, what have we done, they seem to ask. All seem to be thrust into the world, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, condemned to a freedom to which, under their social conditions, they can rarely, if ever, make claim. 

They appear far less alienated when they are active, operating their machines, devices, tools. Then they appear “fulfilled”, endowed with meaning. Work is a mighty identity machine.

The iconographic universe of industry and labour, factory and society, explored in this exhibition, is permeated with the idea of the multifaceted: many levels, paths, different time lines, atmospheres intersecting or runnning parallel to each other – like the man on his donkey cart in front of an industrial facility in a photograph by Pepi Merisio or Andre Kertesz’s juxtaposition of a small bell tower against the two towers of the World Trade Center. For the Surrealists, the challenge lay in subverting images in order to alter the forms of representation. But it is equally important to subvert through the images, to overturn the facts of reality. “Over the course of time,” wrote Andre Breton, “the power of images can bring about true revolutions.” We live in a world in which we are presented with this every single day. Our goal is certainly not a revolution: but we want to build an epic, ignite a fire of images – and we want to do it with the photography from the MAST collection.