Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
ist paintings, such as Adolf von Menzel's
Iron Rolling Mill
, this ideal-
ized view of industrial work is superseded by interiors of industrial
plants that are overcrowded with workers, replete with machinery, and
overheated by steam and fire (Figure 15b). In the early twentieth
century
depictions of industrial workers became more overtly politicized em-
blems of the socialist (and national-socialist) movements in many coun-
tries. As seen in the soviet era propaganda poster
Let's consolidate the
victory of socialism in the USSR!
(Figure 16) such images accorded the
workers with even more blatant heroic status than those of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
3.2 Chemical plants as architectural photographs
In current photographs of chemical industry,
15
the classical art historical
motifs of industry, such as plants harmoniously embedded in natural
landscapes, smoking chimneys as a symbol for prosperity, and heroic
workers are virtually absent. Instead, the typical modern image, like
those shown in Figure 17, is remarkably reiterative and self-reflexive.
The most important pictorial elements of chemical plant photographs are
smokestacks, towers, storage tanks, piping, and conduits, with towers or
smokestacks typically growing (by perspectival correction) straight out
of the bulk of the plant into the sky, taking up two thirds or more of the
image (Figures 17a-b). Most of the images employ special lighting
effects: industrial plants are imaged shortly before or after sunset to
ensure vibrant skies that recall the colorful pictorial liquids filling
glassware in most stereotypical representations of the laboratory equip-
ment (see below), while some photos, taken at night, foreground build-
ings with spectacular interior illumination (Figures 17c-d).
In addition, modern images of chemical plants are typically static
rather than dynamic. They are most often portrayed without smoke com-
ing out of their smokestacks and without people working near or with the
equipment. These images, in addition to the curious fact that the plants
15
The following qualitative analyses are based large sets of images that we retrieved
from the internet for a quantitative study of the self-image of science (Schummer &
Spector 2007).
