Michael Collins, Record Pictures
Record Pictures: Photographs from the Archives of the Institution of Civil Engineers (Steidl, Gottingen, 2004)
The photographic tradition of the engineer’s ‘record picture’ – a lineage whose flourishing first 100 years is presented in Michael Collins’ ravishing volume – was defunct by the middle of the last century. The advent of colour, and the replacement of the cumbersome plate camera by more portable alternatives, consigned the genre to the scrap heap of engineering history: which is also to say, to an afterlife as art.
In his introduction Collins traces the restricted aesthetic of these views – half-built bridges, railway lines inching towards perfectly placed vanishing-points – to the calm realism of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. But they seem equally inspired by more recent visions of the earth transformed: the engravings that accompanied early 19th-century geology texts, where tiny human figures watch, awestruck, as vast and inscrutable processes rupture and unfold the earth beneath their feet. Before the engineer’s geometric gaze Man (despite his prodigious labours) is reduced to so much rubbish at the edge of the composition, a sort of melancholy moraine deposited at the sublime terminus of his own history.
These photographs, taken as evidence of progress, present, despite themselves, a world in ruins. For all their pursuit of assiduous perspective, the form that dominates is the stratum; the landscape has been peeled back to reveal the layers that support a fragile, friable surface. Long exposures render sky and sea relatively stable, matt blanknesses above and below. In between is impure flux: a provisional solidity barely supported by spindly cranes and ramshackle wooden armatures. The Forth Bridge in 1887 looks blasted apart; the pipeline of a Tasmanian hydroelectric plant seems like it might flail and buckle at any moment; Battersea Power Station is a primitive accretion of steam and wood, as if its builders can’t yet credit the miracle of electricity.
Of course, such rather kitsch catastrophism is a retrospective fantasy, but it may explain the odd appeal of such images. Collins argues that the genre survives in the typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher and their stylistic heirs. But such is the piling up of ancillary detritus in these photographs, so riven and eroded are their landscapes, that he might as easily have discerned an avatar in Robert Smithson. Invited by the Bechers to Oberhausen in 1968, the artist eschewed his hosts’ architectural clarity to ‘wrestle with the cinders’ of a lunar hinterland. Record Pictures is evidence also of Smithson’s ‘memory traces of an abandoned set of futures’.
Brian Dillion
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