It’s Complex Systems in HD in “Infrastructure”

If Bernd and Hilla Becher tried to systematize industrial operations into banal presentations, flat-framed black-and-white photographs that demonstrated the utilitarian morpheme nature of the thing itself, be it blast furnace or nuclear plant, now the same landscapes are lush electronic fields, displayed as wide as your screen allows.  This is a genre of wide-screen online photography magazines (new in the last two years) including Acurator, Pictorymag, and blog Featureshoot. Pictory recently published Infrastructure: curated by guest editor Todd Lappin (of Telstar Logistics). The bridges at the top of the vertically scrolling magazine include Verrazano Narrows Bridge; Victoria Falls Bridge; Wanganui Rail Bridge (New Zealand) a stretch of Seattle Highway, and yes, a blast furnace in Cleveland.

Infrastructure means the bones of things. When broken, the whole organism is destabilized. But its not so much ruins porn or a post-earthworks-artists sense of landscape  that predominates from a look at this online photo-essay. Save, perhaps, in  the photo by Tim Melideo, a grad student from LA living in NY of a factory “somewhere in New Mexico,” which I believe is part of Northrop Grumman operations along I25 heading north from Albuquerques Tech Corridor.

Tim Melideo says,

This was somewhere in New Mexico, and I loved how the smoke from the factory fed into the sky to blend with the clouds. For me this was a great reminder of what we are doing to the environment.

Ok, well, clearly for Tim the banality of the statement does what the Bechers used to do with the image. But I still say this is one heck of a view of the familiar ride to Abq., I think this is the Northrop Grumman plant along I25 , the defiled sky as puffy as the bleak clouds over Victor Higgins painting Winter Funeral.

Steve Chapman took this image of the Changi International Airport, Singapore.

Changi Airport Singapore by Steve Chapman

Throne with a View, our featured image, is by a Denver photographer who also appears to have a pretty active new media life and will hopefully be showing up in our pages here more frequently.