Bernd & Hilla Becher: Gas Tanks (1993)
Filed under artist publishing | Tags: · architecture, art, conceptual art, gas, industrial architecture, photography
“Typological, repetitive, at times oddly humorous, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of industrial structures are, in their cumulative effect, profoundly moving. The Bechers’ serenely cool, disarmingly objective, and notoriously obsessive images of water towers, gas tanks, grain elevators, blast furnaces, and mineheads have been taken over several decades, under overcast skies, with a view camera that captures each detail and tonality of wood, concrete, brick and steel.
In this work, the Bechers’ present four principally different forms of gas holders or gas tanks in 140 photographs taken during the years 1963-1992 in Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States. The subjects are photographed under overcast skies that eliminate expressive variations in lighting; the Bechers make no attempt to analyze or explain them. Captions contain only the barest of information: time and place. On the subject of gas holders, the Bechers limit their remarks to a minimal functional description, leaving the aesthetic dimension of their subject to the photographs themselves: much of the fascination of these photographs lies in the fact that these unadorned metallic structures, presumably built with little concern for their visual impact, are almost invariably striking in appearance.”
First published as Gasbehälter, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 1993.
Publisher MIT Press, 1993
ISBN 026202361X, 9780262023610
110 pages with 102 duotone plates
PDF (26 MB)
Comment (0)Naomi Klein: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, agriculture, capitalism, climate, climate crisis, coal, economy, energy, gas, geoengineering, global warming, market, mining, oil, weather
In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.
Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.
Publisher Simon & Schuster, 2014
ISBN 1451697384, 9781451697384
576 pages
Reviews: David L. Ulin (Los Angeles Times, 2014), Sandra Steingraber (EcoWatch, 2014).
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