Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
appear to be neither in operation nor in ruin or decay (in fact, are in pris-
tine condition), disconnects them from the picturesque industrial land-
scapes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, in the
absence of people, modern photographers of chemical industry belie their
debt to more overtly propagandistic images of industrial workers and in-
dustrial sites,
e.g.
in Soviet social realism and American WPA murals,
and to their historical progenitors in the artistic tradition of genre paint-
ings. Finally, the fact that the photographs are situated away from towns
or cities and have no smoke emerging from their smokestacks divorces
them from a variety of conflicting pictorial traditions: the meliorative
nature of 'man's' interaction with nature, the contrasting blight of indus-
trialization in the landscape, and the economic prowess of a particular
nation. By choosing to photograph them as static structures free of hu-
manity in a background featureless except for the atmospheric essence of
the sky, photographers of chemical plants would seem, in fact, to force-
fully sever their connection to earlier artistic traditions. Indeed, the very
contextlessness of the chemical plants shifts them from early twentieth
century industrial images that reflected nationalist pride to the post-
nationalist identity of the globalized corporation.
To what do these images owe their historical debts if not the indus-
trial landscapes of art history? Because of their focus on smokestacks,
tanks, and other equipment essential to industrial-scale chemistry, and
because of their lack of context, one might be tempted to interpret them
as representationally realistic and therefore to fit, perhaps, within the tra-
dition exemplified by Bernd and Hilla Becher's bleak industrial land-
scape photographs taken from 1959 forward (Becher & Becher 2002). It
might also be easy to dismiss these repetitive photographs as simply the
products of commercial photographers commissioned by chemical indus-
try, and thus being of little visual interest. Some would say that they
simply become boring; yet others would point out that these are precisely
the qualities that make them interesting: their stance of disinterestedness,
their visual isolation, their juxtaposition of an industrial, unnatural sub-
ject against an atmospheric sky, and the very fact that they are reiterative.
Indeed, in this latter reading, if instead of being produced in a commer-
cial context, the photographs had been created as 'high' art, a critic might
