Industrial photography is presented here as a field in transition:

from classical representations of factories and labour to images of globalized, outsourced, and increasingly opaque production processes.

The book brings together the exhibitions presented at MAST in 2015. Industry Today examines the decline of classical industry and traditional industrial photography, the outsourcing of production to Asia, and the rapid development of new technologies. Through the dense and often almost impenetrable photographs of Olivo Barbieri, Henrik Spohler, Carlo Valsecchi, Stéphane Couturier, Thomas Struth, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, the exhibition reflects on the difficulty of visually grasping today’s industrial landscapes.

Foto/Industria presents works by Raphaël Dallaporta, Madhuban Mitra & Manas Bhattacharya, Marc Roig Blesa / Rogier Delfos, and Óscar Monzón, the young finalists of the GD4PhotoArt prize. A parallel exhibition, Album to Book. Italian Industry in 120 Volumes, dedicated to the research of Savina Palmieri, traces the history of industrial photography in Italy. It shows how photographic representation moved from the album to the pamphlet and eventually to the book.

For more than a century, industry used photography as a promotional and documentary tool, producing photo albums, brochures, leaflets, and anniversary publications. The 2015 programme also included a retrospective of the Anglo-German photographer Emil Otto Hoppé, organized in collaboration with the Hoppé archives. The exhibition presented 192 previously unpublished industrial photographs, revealing Hoppé’s romantic, existential, and at times almost spiritual view of human achievement within the broader context of nature.