“I never want to see another picture of ________.” Industry veterans share their pet peeves on themes in contemporary photography. In this series they present their “rule” along with five photographs that break the rule in an effort to show that great work is the exception to the rule.
Totem Machine
Rule Setter: W.G. Beecher, Editor, Don’t Take Pictures
Rule Breaker: Walter Crump
I never want to see another homage to discarded industrial machines. We are instinctively drawn to the aesthetic of machines and what they represent—power encased in hardened metal, seasoned with the grit and rust of use. Moreover, they present potent symbols of human ingenuity and dominance over the natural world. We were here and we built something. The deterioration and breakdown of machines is also compelling as reminders of the limits this dominance and the inescapable effects of time and decay. In this sense, the fascination of a bygone industrial age is understandable.
But fascination does not a picture make. How many photographs have we seen of rusted-out cars, abandoned factories, and the like? The stories they present are generally indistinct and unmemorable. Few photographs look at the detritus of the industrial age and help us see it in a different light. Fewer still seek to present something new.
Boston-based photographer and painter Walter Crump is an exception. Rather than stumbling upon old machines and photographing them as they lay, he collects their components and fashions them into complex assemblage sculptures that he then photographs with a pinhole camera. The resulting toned black-and-white images are mysterious and distorted, incomprehensible yet vaguely familiar. Crump styles these arrangements as “machines without a purpose.” His tinkering is purely aesthetic, creating machines that appear more fascinating than real ones.
Finding a visual aesthetic between steampunk and abandoned ruins, these photographs stand out because they hint at a larger purpose. Some components may be recognizable, but the fiction that Crump creates thrives because we lack the knowledge of how machines work and why we built them. In an era of battery-powered cars and flatscreen displays, vacuum tubes and typewriter hammers appear as baffling anachronisms. By building machines that are visually plausible, Crump highlights and plays on our estrangement from the industrial age and the machinery that built it.
— W.G. Beecher
Empire
Machine Without a Purpose
Carborartor