Mick Hartley

Remains of an abandoned colliery in the Ruhrgebiet:

From the wonderful IndustrieKultur-Fotografie website.

Why it should be that the Germans lead the field in the photography and preservation of the industrial past I really don’t know, but there it is. You’d think that with our history as the first country to industrialise, we’d be keen to record, if not preserve, as much as possible, but outside of our peculiar fondness for steam trains*, that’s not really the case.

Those photographic pioneers Bernd and Hilla Becher no doubt have something to do with it. Harald Finster is a disciple. Look at this. Look at the scale of those blast furnaces compared to the cars. That’s stupendous, monumental. Somehow the black and white emphasises the structure, the sculptural quality. It brings out the strength, the beauty, by taking you away from the day-to-dayness, the prosaic colours that we’re too familiar with. It’s almost like an x-ray. Stark…immortal. With modern industry being invariably housed nowadays in some variety of large shed, that’s a sight from the past. And – though it’s not how we tend to see it, overwhelmed as we are with all the baggage of pollution and proletarianisation that came with industrialisation – there’s surely something heroic in those massive structurees.

Here’s Finster’s website.

* Macclesfield-based David Kitching is one of the two English contributors to IndustrieKultur-Fotografie. At his own website the photographs of Chinese steam trains, including the Baotou steelworks, are well worth a look.