Another great photoset from the BOSTON.COM this time on the theme of “work”. It’s a set that I bookmarked ages ago and only just re-discovered it, but there are some amazing images, especially the ones which show a stage in the extraction or production of various materials. I’ve picked out my favourite ‘material’ based ones (pictured above) and below are the original captions to accompany the images:
1. “A steel mill employee works with molten rods at a mill in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010.”
2. “Afghan men collect wool threads prior to being dyed at a carpet manufacturer on January 9, 2010 in Kabul, Afghanistan. The highly prized and typically expensive carpets and rugs are one of Afghanistan’s best recognised exports…”
3. “An employee monitors the blast furnace at the ArcelorMittal Ostrava steel plant in Ostrava, Czech Republic, on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010.”
4. “An employee pours molten aluminum at United Company Rusal’s Bogoslovsky alumin[i]um smelter, Russia.”
5. “A front-loader is used to fill trucks with de-icing salt at a storage facility in the southern German city of Heilbronn on January 12, 2010.”
6. “Laborers classify coal at a coal dump site in Changzhi, Shanxi province, China on January 6, 2010.”
It’s certainly not a new idea, but this subject would make an a beautiful book + a nice way to provide an insight into the way everyday materials are found, extracted, processed etc… And maybe even a chapter about the voids the extracted materials leave behind + the life of these spaces after extraction… I’m sure there are loads of photography studies like this already, but if there aren’t then there should be! Maybe it’s something that someone like EDWARD BURTYNSKY could take on?!… Or maybe I should buy a decent camera at last…