{"id":297590,"date":"2025-12-03T23:25:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T23:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/297590\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T23:25:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T23:25:20","slug":"the-unintended-beauty-of-big-industry-in-the-21st-century-in-photographs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/297590\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unintended Beauty of Big Industry in the 21st Century – in Photographs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI have a childlike way of looking at things,\u201d he explains. \u201cInstead of being like, \u2018I know what that is\u2019 or \u2018I know what that does,\u2019 my reaction is \u2018what the hell is that, it looks like a monster!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013 Alastair Philip Wiper<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Unintended<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s largest nuclear research facility, a Danish cannabis farm and a shoe factory<\/a> in Indonesia. His pictures capture the \u201caccidental aesthetics of industry and science\u201d. Is this is the future foretold in The World in 2030 AD<\/a>?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Unintended<\/p>\n

adidas shoe factory, Indonesia. At adidas\u2019s 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. \u00a9 Alastair Wiper<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew I wanted to make a living out of photography, but fashion photography didn\u2019t interest me and portrait or street photography wasn\u2019t going to make me any money,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore that, I didn\u2019t have a specific interest in industry, engineering or science, but as soon as I began shooting these kinds of places I became completely fascinated,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought I could travel and get access to places people don\u2019t get to see. Then companies would hire me to photograph their factories, and I\u2019d have creative freedom to make artwork out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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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. \u00a9 Alastair Wiper<\/p>\n

In 2020, Wiper published\u00a0Unintended 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. \u201cI have a childlike way of looking at things,\u201d he explains. \u201cInstead of being like, \u2018I know what that is\u2019 or \u2018I know what that does,\u2019 my reaction is \u2018what the hell is that, it looks like a monster!\u2019 My imagination runs wild, and that\u2019s the fun part.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Unintended
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Aurora Nordic medicinal cannabis greenhouse, Denmark. Mads Pedersen, a third-generation tomato grower, is the owner of Scandinavia\u2019s 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. \u00a9 Alastair Wiper<\/p>\n

\"Unintended<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Octopus,\u201d 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\u2019s second-largest factory, with 270 injection-molding machines creating up to 100 million figures a year. \u00a9 Alastair Wiper<\/p>\n

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Odeillo Solar Furnace, France. The sun\u2019s 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. \u00a9 Alastair Wiper<\/p>\n

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Plywood mock-up of part of the ATLAS Detector, CERN, Switzerland. A stone\u2019s throw from Geneva airport are the laboratories of CERN, the birthplace of the internet and the home of the world\u2019s 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. \u00a9 Alastair Wiper<\/p>\n

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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. \u00a9 Alastair Wiper<\/p>\n

\"Unintended<\/p>\n

Danish Crown\u2019s Horsens Slaughterhouse, Denmark. Of the pork slaughtered in Denmark, 90 per cent is exported, and Danish Crown is the world\u2019s 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. \u00a9 Alastair Wiper<\/p>\n

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Sausage Factory, Denmark. Gol\u2019s 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. \u00a9 Alastair Wiper<\/p>\n

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. \u00a9 Alastair Wiper.<\/p>\n

Via: Lens Culture<\/p>\n

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