Strange Beauty

Since the Luddites started smashing machinery and William Blake wrung his romantic hands over the “dark Satanic mills,” Western culture’s ambivalence about technology has not fully resolved itself. Our relationship to the mechanics of modern life is characterized by a kind of willed ignorance, a romantic sense of the nobility of nature that exists alongside our galloping consumptive impulses, so obviously destructive of the natural world. When it comes to the raw materials and machinery that run our power-mad lifestyles, we’re like a certain guilty Shakespearean party, frantically washing our hands even as we order up more murders.

One of the most popular movies of the last year, for example, was “Erin Brockovich,” in which our heroine takes up arms against a wicked corporate bully, the power company. Her arms, however, are cell phones, copy machines, tape recorders, things that tend not to work without power. One of her rewards, naturally, takes the form of a brand new SUV. The irony that producing power is not now and never has been an ecologically friendly process seems not to have occurred to the audiences sitting in temperature-controlled theaters, watching these electronically-generated images.

As if in penance for such American simple-mindedness, John Sexton’s large-format photographs in “Places of Power: The Aesthetics of Technology” examine the maddening contradictions in our relationship to technology. Sexton, an internationally renowned printmaker, built his reputation on the kind of cool, classically composed black-and-white images of the grandeur of nature that we associate with Ansel Adams; indeed, Sexton was Adams’ photographic assistant from 1979 to 1984. His two previous books, “Quiet Light” and “Listen to the Trees,” feature beautifully textured and precise landscape photography. So “Places of Power” is a departure for him. Its subjects--divided into four sections--are all man-made: ancient Anasazi stone dwellings; the Hoover Dam; a coal-burning power plant in Alma, Wis.; and the Space Shuttle, photographed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and referred to in his headnotes as “the single most complex system ever assembled in human history.” He treats these more controversial subjects as if they’re as majestic as his natural ones, but that celebratory treatment itself exposes the tension between the organic and the artificial. As we move from the Anasazi photos of pleasingly simple, symmetrical stone structures to the dam, power plant and Shuttle photos, which confronted us with massive, fearsome, unnatural and arguably unbeautiful subjects, an implicit subtext seems to emerge, evoking our visceral and cultural responses to these mechanical monstrosities.

Of course, photographers have long focused on technology. In the 1920s and ‘30s, all manner of bridges, buttresses and pistons--from the George Washington Bridge to Ford’s River Rouge plant outside Detroit--were romanticized by the likes of Charles Sheeler, Maurice Bratter and Margaret Bourke-White in Fortune magazine. Ben Glaha, the official photographer of the Hoover Dam project, produced an archive of still photos and motion-picture footage emphasizing the dam’s sheer size: In 1936, when it was completed, it was the highest dam in the world at 726 feet. His photos elevated the complexity and aesthetically satisfying repetitive patterns of its machinery to an art form, lionizing the workmen along with the work.

Contemporary work casts a more ambivalent gaze on such subjects. Robert Adams’ images, from the 1960s on, focus on garishly lighted gas stations and amusement parks in Western settings that were once pristine. John Pfahl’s 1980s “Power Places” series includes “Indian Point Nuclear Plant, Hudson River, New York” (1982), featuring a many-branched tree spreading its sweeping limbs over the tiny twin towers of a nuclear plant in the background. Given that photography, along with film, has reflected more than any other medium the darkening of the century’s mood regarding technology, Sexton’s rhetoric in “Places of Power” concerning an “unexpected beauty . . . drawing together the Anasazi sites, the power plants, and Hoover Dam” seems jarringly naive. After all, the bowels of a power plant were hardly what Keats was thinking of when he cried, “O Attic shape!”

The photos themselves, however, tell a more complicated story. To begin with, the Anasazi photos, of stone dwellings hardly more technologically complex than a beaver lodge--see “Structure in Sandstone Landscape, Sunset” or “Flame Ruin”--are breathtakingly beautiful in the traditional sense, and yet their significance goes far beyond beauty. The cliff walls into which these tiny structures were wedged seem both to sweep outward from them and to bear down on them, sheltering and threatening, emphasizing their vulnerable, human scale. Their “ruined” nature--enduring while collapsing--reminds us of the mystery of the disappearance of the Anasazi people from the landscape, a mystery that has spawned theories about catastrophic drought, warfare and cannibalism and here suggests the ephemeral nature of humanity. Turning the page from “Flame Ruin” to “Hoover Dam at Night,” it is impossible not to see that the idea of a rock wall spanning a crevice has somehow metastasized over the course of some 700 years, aspiring to a scale far beyond the human. Turning the page back--from the dam to the dwelling--it is impossible not to wonder whether the Hoover’s history might not one day be as “lost,” as mysterious, as that of the Anasazi, an impression reinforced by the lack of human figures anywhere in this book.

Once we enter the realms of the dam, power plant and shuttle photos, we are deep into territory littered with cultural referents: We’ve seen these sexy monsters and phallic lines--polished steel turbine shafts, transmission towers, steam pipes--before. “Nevada Transmission Line Tower at Night”--its skeletal scaffolding and lines snaking off into the black--might have loomed right out of Frankenstein; the pinpoint of light at the center of “Air Shaft Tunnel” recalls the unblinking stare of HAL 9000, the malign computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”; the cold, antiseptic sterility of “Steam Turbine, Alma, Wisconsin” and “Pipe Gallery and Walkways”--intestines rendered in metal--are familiar from the sets of Ridley Scott’s and James Cameron’s “Alien” movies; and anyone who has ever watched “The X-Files” will recognize “3,024 Drawers of Space Shuttle Parts, Logistics Facility” as a mate to that show’s iconic shot of aisles of drawers containing the secret minutiae of millions of lives held in government warrens.

These fantastical sci-fi touchstones lend resonance to photographs which do not--Sexton’s assumptions about “overlooked beauty” to the contrary--exist in a vacuum. In his boosterish foreword to this book, Walter Cronkite asserts that “the Space Age will be replaced by another age, one we cannot imagine,” one which he clearly expects to be heroic; in fact, photographers and filmmakers have been imagining the technological New Age for decades. Their imaginings have been based precisely on the kinds of images Sexton has gathered here, and their forecasts have been harrowing, terrifying, alienating. A way of life that is entirely reliant on and subsumed by generator banks, steam turbines and air locks is a frightening one, as the films of Cameron--a director obsessed with the lethality of heavy machinery, from “Terminator” to “Titanic”--so vividly attest. Strangely, Sexton seems to have missed his own point, but no matter; he’s hardly the first artist to have done so. In choosing to capture the eerie, evanescent perfection of our most complex creations, he has proclaimed--knowingly or not--that they are our doing before they are our undoing.