The aestheticization of cooling towers in photography

Eric de Maré brings forth something profound in these deep charcoal tones: a representation of two epistemes, two systems of thought. The colossal towers of Ferrybridge B appear at once quite primitive, as though shaped from clay, and aggressively, fervently, modern. Nestled in their shadow, the little church persists as a place of worship, a sanctuary from the vagaries of modern life. But its symbolic stature is radically diminished. Only in a godless world could it be dwarfed by a pair of monoliths whose shape and scale, though manifestly utilitarian, is also bound up with discourses of boundless progress and the exploitation of universal forces.

Cooling towers proliferated in Britain during the 1950s, but are dwindling fast. Largely overlooked by architectural historians, and deemed - at least for now - by heritage bodies as too abundant to save, around a third have already disappeared - many in the last several years. This is a shame because, as Otto Saumuarez Smith observes in this thoughtful eulogy to Ironbridge B (perhaps the finest and most theatrical sequence to have been dynamited so far), cooling towers embody a unique and revolutionary design.

‘Whether or not you see an abstractly humanoid presence in cooling towers, as I do, there is something elementally graceful about the way that they make heavy concrete visually light through a tender hyperboloid curve.’

And yet few will register, let alone regret, their demise. Most of us are not routinely exposed to the unlovely edgelands of infrastructure where cooling towers stand. It usually takes a trip up the motorway, or along the East Coast Main Line (where at one point each member of the Aire Valley trio of Ferrybridge, Eggborough and Drax is visible) to bring them to consciousness. The other main way is through photography. Some photographers have found years of inspiration in cooling towers. Reginald Van de Velde’s Landscapes Within takes the viewer inside the cavernous condensation-streaked drums, highlighting, for all the outward uniformity, their surprising internal variation. And the abstract monochrome studies of Michael Kenna help us become aware of the towers’ sculptural strangeness, to see them anew.

Michael Kenna, ‘Ratcliffe Power Station, Study 26, Nottinghamshire, England’, 1986. His long exposures make the towers look semi-cosmic, somehow in touch with the universe.

Others have found in cooling towers a powerful symbol for addressing socio-political themes. One of the best-known is John Davies’ winter view of Agecroft Power Station (a possible referent for Simon Roberts, Mitch Epstein and others). Like the Bechers in their post-typological work, Davies sought to reveal the tensions of a particular historical conjuncture through sweeping compositions.

John Davies, ‘Agecroft Power Station’, 1983

The towers seem latched to the Earth like alien limpets. But they cascade and ripple into themselves like fabric at the moment of demolition. From the tangles of branches in the foreground, via the expanse of cleared land to the domineering hulk in the background, Davies distils in one image the gradual stripping back of the land in fits and starts of gradual optimisation and frenetic subjugation.

It’s easy enough to overlook the white horse. Standing beside the cars, it throws into relief the layering of historical worlds. At the time of Davies’ visit, Agecroft had another ten years of operation. Now that little sign of it remains (the site is now a prison), the photograph takes on a new resonance. The horse, obsolete for most functional purposes, confronts a concrete behemoth in the twilight of its own productive use.

Shirley Baker, ‘Cooling towers through the rooftops’, Salford, 1962

Here is Agecroft captured twenty years previously by Shirley Baker from a Salford backstreet. From a distance, it has a very different energy. What in Davies comes across as faintly sinister is here almost mundane, blending in with the Victorian chimney stacks. The overall impression is not of encroachment but of managed separation.

In stark contrast is Bill Brandt’s view of 1930s Halifax. Here, the foreground dwellings are fully embroiled within the industrial organism. The towers are the centrepiece of the composition, and probably the standout feature of the lost cityscape. But for me it’s the infinite regress of smokestacks and illusion of a double flattening which make this image great. It’s as though Brandt photographed a model for a Gothic stop-motion, complete with the forced perspective of a delicately painted backdrop.

In a late-career interview, he recalled Halifax as ‘absolutely extraordinary; a real dream town - I’d never seen anything like it before.’ For an artist with his vision and sense of the surreal, this charred forest of brick and mortar must have been an intoxicating sight. Indeed, when looking at his other work from the same period, it’s difficult not to feel a kind of perverse wistfulness for the spectacles of the Industrial Revolution.

A similar feeling is evoked by Michał Cała’s extraordinary series Silesia, captured in the late 70s and 80s when the ‘Black Triangle’ industries were at their zenith. Cała finds beauty not just in cooling towers and sublime juxtapositions, but also in frozen wastelands and the patterns of pollution - perhaps to an uncomfortable extent. His later colour work is less compelling, more a record of structural change in the region than an aestheticization of industry. But I was particularly struck by this tower on the outskirts of Bogatynia in Poland’s south-western extremity.

From Michał Cała, Silesia 2004-2009

The cartoon sun raises intriguing questions. On whose orders was it painted, and for what purpose? It suggests a desire to mediate between technology and nature, to domesticate the structures, perhaps even to celebrate their wealth-creating capacities. It was probably part of a post-communist beautification drive, a bid to brighten up a landscape blighted by decades of lignite mining (the vast open-pit nearby has consumed whole villages). But for all the pastel kitsch, it’s a conspicuously half-hearted intervention. We remain on the plain of a veiled antagonism.

From Alexander Gronsky, Pastoral (2009-2012)

With this wonderfully beguiling photograph by Alexander Gronsky, however, we come close to reconciliation. In the clear skies above the meadow, the clouds seem to drift out of the towers’ lips. The people in the bower introduce a touch of everyday life but, as with Davies’ white horse, they are the magic element which somehow completes the scene.

But as soon as the meta-context comes into focus, the image loses its lustre. It’s not possible to hold in mind the environmentally destructive function to which the towers are annexed without also viewing the image as faintly deceptive - a fantasy of harmonious co-existence. So perhaps it’s best simply to appreciate the photograph on its own terms, to ignore the function of the structures and admire them for their tender curves.

For me, however, such abstracted enjoyment is foreclosed by the bands of the Russian Federation encircling Tower One - a reminder that beyond this lovely edgeland is a world of coercive states. It’s a very different form of embellishment to Bogatynia, a symbol of power and possession which, at the level of Gronsky’s composition, disturbs the harmony of the scene, preventing its totalisation or symbolic closure. And it’s that, I think, which makes it a great photograph.

Marc Riboud, Leeds, 1953

Nostalgia Loops: analogue photography in the age of Instagram

As with all art forms, photography evolves when practitioners do something radical to express a new way of seeing. Whether in response to social or political upheaval, technological breakthroughs or creative intuition (and usually a combination of all three), these moments of contradiction give way to transition when received conventions are challenged and eventually ossified. I am increasingly interested in the question of how the medium can progress in an age when almost anything is a legitimate subject, smartphones come fitted with Leica lenses and flawless auto-exposure, and millions of images are uploaded to the internet every hour.

In this context, the analogue-digital dichotomy is increasingly blurred and hybridised by artists sceptical of photography’s longstanding claim to epistemic privilege. Indeed, the most expensive photograph sold at auction, Andreas Gursky’s abstract landscape ‘Rhein II’, was first captured on medium format outside Düsseldorf, then scanned and digitally manipulated to remove all sign of infrastructure on the far riverbank. But of course the strangely depthless bands of ethereal green and grey that result nevertheless depict a clearly man-altered landscape. The final image is something of a photorealistic Rothko.

In this vein, practitioners have also turned towards interrogation of the medium itself, its particular grammar and functions. Emblematic are Gregory Crewdson’s elaborate tableaux, which look almost computer generated, or the overblown pixels of Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs series. Clare Strand’s Deutsche Borse Prize-nominated The Discrete Channel with Noise also draws attention to the transmission and reception of photographs in the digital age - their inherent bittiness.

Andreas Gursky, ‘Rhein II’, 1999

Andreas Gursky, ‘Rhein II’, 1999

In a parallel development, and perhaps partly in response to the glutting of cyberspace with snaps, film photography has made a comeback in recent years. The growing visibility of analogue-centred accounts on photo and video sharing platforms is testament to this. As the lionising tendencies of the metaphorical platform play out in force, YouTube and Instagram have enabled aspiring photographers to bypass traditional gatekeepers. There’s no longer such a need to be in the right place at the right time: film devotees are able to build and engage an audience whose loyalty can be monetised in the service of personal projects. This is an exciting development. But it is also fuelling a growing disconnect between the concerns of contemporary art photography and the interventions of those shaping the interests of analogue amateurs and hobbyists.

A notable innovation on Instagram is the ‘community feed’ – internet magazines with no operating costs and curators sometimes separated by oceans. The most popular have followers in the tens-of-thousands, and as these numbers grow, so too does the algorithmic force of attraction. As little hubs in the fabric of Instagram’s spacetime, they draw in a deluge of hash-tagged content. More so than with traditional magazines, there is an imperative for them to stay on brand. The largely ad hoc, informal gathering of content leaves little scope for distinct issues based around a particular theme or concept. As such, the grid as a whole must appear coherent if not uniform. And I am struck by the fact that, for a number of successful feeds including @burbsonfilm, @makemeseemag and @thefilmstead, the images are selected according to a unifying aesthetic saturated by nostalgia. Scrolling through the grid, the viewer is presented with very little that comments on the vicissitudes of the present.

Indeed, the palette, atmosphere and subjects evoke the work of the American colour pioneers who in the 1970s challenged black-and-white as the only respectable language for art photography. The subjects of Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz and others gain new currency on Instagram: chunky television sets and other retro appliances, laundry interiors, suburban homes, faded boardwalks and, above all, the classic American car. The smooth plains and gentle undulations of Chryslers and Chevrolets appear again and again, sometimes contextualised in a garage, parking lot or leafy street; occasionally found shrouded in a cover loose enough to reveal the pleasing metallic contours underneath. These subjects are sought out in sentimental defiance of the all-enveloping grip of modernity at its frontier, the echoes then disseminated by a sequence of steps wholly alien to their reference period.

Particularly when seen together, the photos are undoubtedly beautiful: sunlight streams through diner windows to illuminate glasses of fresh juice, lamps glow in dim hotel rooms, palm trees stretch the frame. The images hark back to a time when things were somehow more transparent, more tangible. As such, they have a kind of soothing presence, a stillness.

Nostalgia (from nostos, home; and algos, pain) as a feeling or state of mind is rooted in an apprehension of the irreversibility of time. It hasn’t been so long since these scenes were banal. Indeed, their very banality underpinned the whole New Topographics movement. But as we are drawn further into the postmodern vortex of free-floating bits and pixels that artists such as Ruff are grappling with, they are slipping ever more into the domain of fantasy. This slipping-away certainly amplifies our propensity towards sentimentality. But more instrumental to the manufacture of nostalgia is the economy of recognition which governs the circulation of signifiers on Instagram.

In the churning froth underlying the continuity of its visual stream, the signified is lost or rendered subordinate by the platform’s engagement algorithms. The effect is self-sustaining and self-reinforcing: images are endlessly imitated, reproduced and shared in a kind of photographic echo chamber. Photos circulate, pregnant with the legacy of the colour pioneers - sometimes without the awareness of their creator.

The ellipsis here is of course loaded with words unsaid: the ‘woman’s hand’ makes all the difference. Juxtaposed like this, Bruce Brown’s nice but otherwise unremarkable image of air travel seems sapped. It’s a snapshot, a record of modern comfort in a time when affordable air travel is taken for granted - a ‘social photo’. The Eggleston referent, by contrast, is timeless and uncanny: the cocktail emanates a kind of energy; the ethereal partial-object stirring it gives the image an air of voyeurism.

The formerly banal: Stephen Shore, ‘Thirty-First Avenue and Crescent Street’, 1974

The formerly banal: Stephen Shore, ‘Thirty-First Avenue and Crescent Street’, 1974

The rise of film photography on new media platforms has also contributed towards what could be described as the deterritorialisation of the Americana aesthetic. This phenomenon has found recent expression, for instance, in British photographer Ian Howorth’s debut monograph Arcadia (2019), which he describes as a visual representation of Britishness. Although paying titular homage to a vision of pastoralism uncorrupted by the vices of civilisation, Howorth does not seek some kind of Merrie Olde England. Rather, he looks to the traces of a pre-digital age in what is also described as a personal exploration of his fraught relationship to the concepts of home and identity.

The cover image, leaves and petals pressed up against frosted glass in a way that makes it appear almost permeable, immediately establishes the organising principle of the work: seeing though a filter. Although Arcadia does often capture the little quirks of England in a thoughtfully observed way, much of the series depicts the same kind of recycled nostalgia as the community film feeds: diners, vintage sports cars, faded seafronts. At times it is more America than England: at least one image could have been made in Palm Springs.

The point is not to discount the beauty and mystery of Howorth’s work. His soft interiors with their muted pastel tones complement wonderfully the vivid colour of his sunlit exteriors. But, as the photographer himself suggests, the series ultimately amounts to a blast of dreamy ‘nostalgia porn’. It has little to say about Britishness in the 2020s. When Howorth turns his lens towards the ‘unusual colours’ that defy the ‘neutral’ tones of contemporary England, he is expressing longing for another place that was actual once, but is now lost to time. His nostalgia is thus a kind of ‘utopia in reverse’, to use Andreas Huyssen’s phrase.

‘Although I have a genuine love for all the scenes I photograph, for me, it’s their survival amidst rampant modernity that interests me the most.’

- Ian Howorth

What strikes me here is the notion that somehow these places would not survive, that the onslaught of ‘progress’ would be so totalising as to eliminate all traces of a former modernity. But the implicit proposition is interesting. Perhaps an enhanced appreciation of the material co-existence of multiple temporalities could indeed remind us that the present is not immutable: attitudes are not fixed, lifestyles not static. The onward rumbling of modernity is a function not only of technological progress but also of human agents making decisive cuts into the fabric of reality. Perhaps, then, the selective representation of the present in all its constitutive unevenness could alert us to its radical openness, its actuality.

The problem when it comes to Arcadia is that Howorth makes no allowance for anything beyond 1985 in the frame. He celebrates that which escapes the flattening and dislocation effects of global convergence patterns but refuses any immanent indication of their unevenness. In his representational bubble, the tensions of the current age are therefore obfuscated. Ultimately, the fact of the book’s publishing in 2019 is more significant with respect to understanding the age than its contents.

One common reading conceives nostalgia as a kind of compensatory impulse, a reaction to the frenetic pace of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’. To live in age of cynical reason is to live under the sway of the basic ideological injunction to Enjoy and to more or less accept the coordinates of the political-economic status quo. In response, the photographic curation of reality fetishistically avows the past as more meaningful than the present. But in so doing, the complexity of the bygone age is glossed. What we get instead is a phantasmic projection whose function is to fill the void of the present, a world rendered grey not only in colour palettes but in teleological, ontological and theological knowledge also.

This is only to suggest that when photographers uncritically embrace the past through mimesis, their work cannot usually provoke much more than idle enjoyment or psychic pacification. While Howorth can offer us escape from the antagonisms, even the sheer blandness, of neoliberal society through heightened awareness of vintage forms and spaces, he cannot substantially alter our relation to the modern world and its predicates. And when the same impulse to document nostalgically is subordinated to and reinforced by the logic of Instagram’s algorithms and the economy of recognition they serve, the effect is doubly numbing: circulation takes precedence over signification.

Most of us, I believe, ultimately accept the impossibility of discarding our digital support systems and the entire technological substratum which continually and by necessity renders their elements outdated - not only in form but also in their very relations to one other. And so even if not always in outward appearance, the suburbia of the colour pioneers is lost forever. This is so too because, when their scenes and subjects pop up amidst Howorth’s ‘rampant modernity’, they are no longer banal. Indeed, as the community feeds highlight, a new kind of aura is being created around vintage cars and the rest.

‘Chudleigh’, from Robin Friend’s Bastard Countryside (2018). The work is a kind of anti-Arcadia: landscapes neither fully blighted nor preserved, but rather altered, corrupted – hybrids.

‘Chudleigh’, from Robin Friend’s Bastard Countryside (2018). The work is a kind of anti-Arcadia: landscapes neither fully blighted nor preserved, but rather altered, corrupted – hybrids.