photography – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: photography

ivanpah

[At Wired, a gallery of photographs of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, by Jamey Stillings. At completion, the Ivanpah facility is expected to be the largest operational solar power facility in the world.]

petrochemical america

[From the top: diagram by SCAPE of off-shore oil facilities in the Gulf; Richard Misrach’s “Roadside Vegetation and Orion Refining Corporation, Good Hope, Louisiana, 1998” ; diagram by SCAPE of the various chemical products manufactured and refined in “Cancer Alley”. All from Petrochemical America, and visible at a higher resolution in this gallery at the New […]

venue interview with edward burtynsky

[Edward Burtynsky’s “Drylands Farming #7” — farms in Monegros County, Aragon, Spain.] Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley recently posted an interview with infrastructural landscape photographer extraordinaire Edward Burtynsky, as a component of their latest project, the continentally-roaming Venue (self-described as a “portable media rig, interview studio, multi-format event platform, and forward-operating landscape research base”). In it, Burtynsky aptly […]

athabascan aereality

Business Insider‘s Robert Johnson has been touring various projects, sites, and landscapes in and around Canada’s Athabascan Oil Sands; the photographs he’s bringing back and articles he’s curating are a stunning mixture of the industrial sublime, raw instrumentality (such as: the world’s largest dump truck, and its forty-thousand dollar tires), and a visual testament to […]

spanish bubble landscapes

[Suburban abandonia on the outskirts of Madrid, via google maps.] During the presentations at Visualizar last summer, one of the presenters (I think it was José Luis Muñoz Muñoz, but I haven’t re-watched his presentation, so I’m not totally sure) mentioned a photography project that sought to document the post-bubble abandonment of parts of the […]

willow fascine mattress

[Before the use of articulated concrete mats was standardized, the Army Corps often relied on a variety of other methods of revetment construction.  The weaving and placement of willow fascine mattresses, as seen above, was one such earlier practice; the installation process is remarkably similar to and prefigures the process for concrete mats.  Images via […]

suspension

[In the summer of 1916, a pair of cyclones — one coming from the Gulf of Mexico and making landfall in Mississippi, the other coming from the Atlantic and landing in Charleston, South Carolina — poured torrential rains (“all previous 24-hour records for rainfall were exceeded”) across the southeast. Western North Carolina was hit especially […]

stabilization

[The photography of Toshio Shibata has made its way around before, but, as but does it float reminds us, it is well worth second and third gazes.]

winter hiatus

[Photograph by William Notman & Son, photographers, of a building encased in ice after a fire, 65–83 Little St. James Street, Montréal, Québec, 1888.  From the collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, via Sense of the City.] We’re taking the remainder of the dimly-lit month of December to rest, eat, read, and […]

out in the wind, above ground, out in the weather

[Appropriate for the gradual approach of winter in the mid-Atlantic: photographs from Alexander Gronsky’s “The Edge”, a series of shots taken along the outer boundary of Moscow; via @ballardian.  Thinking about whitesward and glacier wrap again…]

heygate abstracted

Architect and photographer Simon Kennedy’s exhibition 635×508: Heygate Abstracted opens at the Bartlett School of Architecture this Monday.

golden gate estates

[An abandoned portion of the “Golden Gate Estates” — a massive land scam promoted by a Florida developer in the 1960’s — whose miles of canals and roads would have been the infrastructure for the largest subdivision in the United States if the land hadn’t been utterly unsuitable to development. The problem, of course, is that […]

wearable homes

[“Mono Lake”, 2008, from Mary Mattingly’s “Nomadographies”] If you suppose that there is a spectrum of ways that we adapt ourselves to our environment, then “architecture” might be at one end, and “cyborg” (whether psychotropic or technological) could be at the other.  In between, there would be “clothing”.  And if you really want to confuse […]

roosevelt pneumatic

[Collection containers sit in the Roosevelt Island pneumatic system; photograph by Jonathan Snyder for Wired.com] Wired‘s Gadget Lab tours the Roosevelt Island pneumatic trash collection system: In 1969, New York City granted the state a 99-year lease to develop the island, and the planning began. Ideas for the island included housing for United Nations workers, […]

robert overweg

Through Brian Finoki, I ran into the game-world “photography” of Robert Overweg (“Facade 2” pictured above), who hunts the worlds of video games not to run up a body count, but for architectural fragments and broken landscapes, moments where the rough edges of programmed rules find visual expression.  I recommend “Glitches” and “The end of […]

the infrastructural district

[At the Washington Post, photographer David Deal steps inside, above, and beneath the District of Columbia’s infrastructure and other hidden spaces — the “Third Street Tunnel blower room”, pictured above; Blue Plains settlement ponds in Southwest; the specimen room at the Natural History Museum; the Hecht Company warehouse on New York Avenue; and so on.]

ordos, under construction

Strangely affecting photographs of Ordos under construction, via delicious/sevensixfive; my previous thoughts on Ordos here.

re-inhabited circle-k’s

[“Mini-Mart, Albuquerque, NM”; photographer Paho Mann documents the diverse array of stores that re-inhabit the empty shells abandoned by the national corporation Circle-K; the current lives of Circle-K’s include “a dry cleaners, a couple of florist shops, a tattoo parlor, a tuxedo rental place, several mini-marts and dollar stores, and Bridgett’s Last Laugh Karaoke and […]

edward burtynsky, oil

[oil field maintained by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, photographed by Edward Burtynsky (Manufactured Landscapes), via dpr-barcelona; visit Burtynsky’s website for additional images from the book] Edward Burtynsky’s latest book and exhibition explores the landscapes of, machinery that produces, and products dervied from oil: “When I first started photographing industry it was out […]

zibo

[apartment blocks in Zibo, via google maps] A photo essay on the Chinese city of Zibo, in four parts (Zibo I, Zibo II, Zibo III, Zibo IV — best viewed in IE/Safari/Chrome, as some script there tends to upset Firefox), from Moving Cities, who are doing some fascinating research on urbanism in China.  Zibo is […]