index of the production process that transforms raw
materials into industrial products, then distributes
them to outlets for sales or back into production for
further stages of fabrication.
American industrial imagery, particularly engi-
neered tall structures such as cranes, derricks, and
skyscrapers, became of supreme interest to indus-
trializing European countries during the interwar
years of the 1920s and 1930s, engineering an inter-
national Machine Style and a European variant
photography known asNeue Sachlichkeit (New
Objectivity). New Objectivity photography was,
however, contained within the architectural, crafts,
and fine arts disciplines as taught in the Weimar
Bauhaus, an experiment in utopian living and pro-
duction that did not survive the massive military
preparations and suppressions on the eve of World
War II. It was not industrial photography per se.
As codified in the postwar industrial zones and
factories in the 1950s and 1960s on both sides of the
Atlantic, industrial photography has factual/histor-
ical and metaphorical relationships to progress.
The factual/historical relationship entails records
or inventories of processes and machinery that
relate to the monitoring, managing, and improving
of production. The metaphorical relationship is
more obtuse and entails ‘‘pictorial stories’’ of
industry that relate to the instilling of an aura of
productivity. A late-1960s German text defines this
metaphor as marketing of the ‘‘prestige variety’’:
The new photographic style does justice to this develop-
ment by trying to bring out the spirit of our age, to
interpret...the rhythm of modern industry, the precision,
the many interlocking functions on the mechanical,
electrical, chemical, and biological level as an inte-
grated whole....The technical characteristics of such
plants attract the photographer with a flair for pictorial-
ism as much as they provide the technologist with the
information he needs....
(Giebelhausen 1967, 36)The following chronological summary exposes
the factual and metaphorical components of indus-
trial photography as dynamic fields of operation
and representation. It considers the evolving indus-
trial landscape. In order to explain these dynamics,
large projects rather than individual pictures or
photographers are foregrounded, although their
trajectories may intersect individual careers and
styles. Pictures are viewed as industrial artifacts in
production and as archives in distribution.
Archival projects manifest a compulsive desire for com-
pleteness, a faith in an ultimate coherence...an empiri-cist model of truth prevails. Pictures are atomized,
isolated in one way and homogenized in another.
(Sekula 1987, 118)
The summary concludes around 1950. Succeed-
ing decades are most accurately represented as post-
industrial, with industrial imagery and zones
skewed to more personal and ironic approaches
defined and maintained within academic forums
and the art world. As Kim Sichel has explained
The cultural power of the machine as a beacon of the
future has been radically changed. In recent decades,
photography’s relationship with the machine world has
also changed, evolving from a tool for preaching to a
more tentative, ironic, and historicizing record...a more
self-referential stance.
(Sichel 1995, 1, 9)1900–1920: Industrial Zones
Industrial photography became a defined field at
the turn of the century. Before this time numerous
photographs were taken of individual proprie-
torships, shops, and dense industrial areas. These
cannot be defined as industrial zones or ‘‘works’’
because they lack coherence and comprehensive-
ness; in their jumbled heterogeneity they float free
of coordinates or connecting links, save those of
the proprietors or engineers, prominently posed in
the pictures, who were responsible for their
construction or operation. Coordinates were pro-
vided through burgeoning transcontinental rail-
road systems and the concomitant expansion of
factory districts and building types along the rights
of way. By 1900 major railroad lines crisscrossed
and even overlapped the country, converging in
parallel grids or huge arcs at urban gateways and
urban freight yards—the new ‘‘metropolitan
corridors.’’ These grids and arcs, followed by the
overhead lines of electrified trolleys and
locomotives, are both the ‘‘text’’ and organizing
elements of photographs taken along the New
York/New England seaboard; at the Brooklyn
Bridge; and in Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, and
other expanding corridors. Alfred Stieglitz’sHand
of ManandIn the New York Central Yards(1902
and 1893, respectively), feature these grids and
convergences.
At the same time, the ‘‘control of communi-
cation’’ and the establishment of managerial hie-
rarchies in large railroad companies were also
reflected in the photographic codification of indus-
trial building types. Besides monumental bridges,INDUSTRIAL PHOTOGRAPHY