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The Unintended Beauty of Big Industry in the 21st Century – in Photographs
“I have a childlike way of looking at things,” he explains. “Instead of being like, ‘I know what that is’ or ‘I know what that does,’ my reaction is ‘what the hell is that, it looks like a monster!’”
– Alastair Philip Wiper
In 2007, Alastair Philip Wiper first picked up a camera for the first time and began a process that would see him photograph a shipyard in South Korea and a textile mill in the UK, an American sex doll maker, the world’s largest nuclear research facility, a Danish cannabis farm and a shoe factory in Indonesia. His pictures capture the “accidental aesthetics of industry and science”. Is this is the future foretold in The World in 2030 AD?
A graduate of philosophy and politics, Wiper worked as a chef and a graphic designer for a fashion company in Copenhagen. They needed a photographer to shoot some lookbooks, so he volunteered.
adidas shoe factory, Indonesia. At adidas’s Parkland World Indonesia factory 10,000 workers churn out 75,000 pairs of shoes a day (22 million a year). This building is producing adidas Superstars. © Alastair Wiper
“I knew I wanted to make a living out of photography, but fashion photography didn’t interest me and portrait or street photography wasn’t going to make me any money,” he says. Things changed when he saw the work of industrial photographers Wolfgang Sievers and Maurice Broomfield. Both photographers worked during the mid-1900s, capturing post-war industrial landscapes with geometric precision and illuminating human stories against a backdrop of an increasingly mechanised world.
“Before that, I didn’t have a specific interest in industry, engineering or science, but as soon as I began shooting these kinds of places I became completely fascinated,” he says. “I thought I could travel and get access to places people don’t get to see. Then companies would hire me to photograph their factories, and I’d have creative freedom to make artwork out of it.”
Sex doll workshop, RealDoll, USA. A regular doll, which is fully customizable from nipples, to lips, to type of vagina (there are more than ten) averages approximately $7,500. The company has started producing robotic heads for the dolls, which adds an extra $8,000 to the cost. © Alastair Wiper
In 2020, Wiper published Unintended Beauty. The photobook features around 100 locations around the world, from a shipyard in South Korea and a textile mill in the UK, to an American dildo factory. Across these diverse businesses, the photographer captures a beauty within the ugliness of these sublime structures, constructing images that are unexpectedly satisfying and seductive. “I have a childlike way of looking at things,” he explains. “Instead of being like, ‘I know what that is’ or ‘I know what that does,’ my reaction is ‘what the hell is that, it looks like a monster!’ My imagination runs wild, and that’s the fun part.”
Aurora Nordic medicinal cannabis greenhouse, Denmark. Mads Pedersen, a third-generation tomato grower, is the owner of Scandinavia’s largest tomato-growing empire, Alfred Pedersen & Sons. Around 2015 Mads realized that his infrastructure and know-how could be applied to growing medicinal cannabis. Mads began building a 60,000-square-meter facility, the largest in Europe. © Alastair Wiper
“The Octopus,” a machine that propels plastic pellets around the factory, Playmobil, Malta. The German Playmobil company produces all its figures on the Mediterranean island of Malta, and has done since 1976. Over 3 billion have so far been made in the factory there. Today, 1,300 people work in Malta’s second-largest factory, with 270 injection-molding machines creating up to 100 million figures a year. © Alastair Wiper
Odeillo Solar Furnace, France. The sun’s energy is reflected via a series of 9,600 mirrors and concentrated on one very small point to create extremely high temperatures. Built in 1970, it is still used by space agencies like NASA and the ESA to research the effects of extremely high temperatures on certain materials for nuclear reactors and space vehicle re-entry. © Alastair Wiper
Plywood mock-up of part of the ATLAS Detector, CERN, Switzerland. A stone’s throw from Geneva airport are the laboratories of CERN, the birthplace of the internet and the home of the world’s largest particle accelerator. The Atlas Detector is the largest of seven detectors on the Large Hadron Colider, and this model of a small part of the detector was used to test wiring scenarios before installation. © Alastair Wiper
Radio Anechoic Chamber, Technical University of Denmark. This facility opened in 1967, and currently operates with the European Space Agency (ESA) to test microwave antennas for use in satellites and mobile networks, among other things. The idea is to minimize any reflections of microwaves, and the big foam spikes are filled with carbon and iron to absorb radio waves. © Alastair Wiper
Danish Crown’s Horsens Slaughterhouse, Denmark. Of the pork slaughtered in Denmark, 90 per cent is exported, and Danish Crown is the world’s largest exporter. Completed in 2004, the slaughterhouse at Horsens kills approximately 100,000 pigs a week, making it one of the largest in the world. It employs 1,420 people and receives around 150 visitors per day. © Alastair Wiper
Sausage Factory, Denmark. Gol’s factory in Svenstrup, Denmark, has been producing sausages since 1934. The pillars of Danish food culture are shaped out of this processed and congealed pork meat, and if you take different shapes and spice blends into account, the factory produces more than 200 types of sausages, salami, pepperoni, and cold cuts for both retail and the catering industry. © Alastair Wiper
Lead image: Maersk Triple E container ship under construction, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME), South Korea. When it was built the Maersk Triple E was the largest container ship in the world, with a capacity of 18,000 containers: enough space to transport 864 million bananas. © Alastair Wiper.
Via: Lens Culture
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