Wonderful photographs (via Metafilter) of old industrial landscapes, by German photographer Harald Finster. Some of my favourites, after a brief look around, here, here, here, here, here, or, in colour, here. But really, if you like this kind of stuff, you can’t lose.

Of course (I say of course here to indicate my familiarity with this field….oh yes!) the doyens of this type of industrial photography are husband and wife Bernd and Hilla Becher (examples here and here, but I can’t find much on-line). Their books of photographs are published by MIT, and don’t come cheap. I’d recommend their “Blast Furnaces” (no really) – absolutely stunning, though I suppose it’s something of a minority taste. Maybe you need to have been brought up in an industrial area (for me, Sheffield) to go for this kind of thing.

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3 responses to “Industrial Ruins”

  1. Dom Avatar
    Dom

    Silly me — looking at streams or the autumn trees in Rhode Island. All those years! What a waste!
    Dom

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  2. marc w. Avatar
    marc w.

    It doesn’t have to be either or… growing up in an industrial town in the pacific nw meant you could sit on the slag heap of an abandoned copper smelter and look at the smokestack, vying for position with the Olympic mts. Or the gantry cranes and paper smelter framing Mt. Rainier, with the Sound in the foreground. Great stuff, although all the damned arsenic was/is, er, problematic.
    I still love me some Ansel Adams, but I’ll definitely check out the Bechers’ work.

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  3. Venichak Avatar
    Venichak

    http://www.abandoned.ru (the name says it all) has some great stuff, too..

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