“My Photographs Are a Celebration of the Making of Things”: In Conversation with Christopher Payne

“My Photographs Are a Celebration of the Making of Things”: In Conversation with Christopher Payne

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Christopher Payne’s fascination with factories goes back decades. As an architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s, Payne had the good fortune to find a summer job with an agency inside the National Park Service called the Historic American Buildings Survey. “They sent teams of architecture students, historians, and photographers to document all kinds of projects,” he says. “We documented grain elevators in Buffalo, cast iron bridges in Ohio, a power plant in Alabama, and national parks in Utah. That experience instilled a deep appreciation for industrial architecture.” After graduation, he worked for several years as an architect in New York City before transitioning full-time to photography. His previous books include New York’s Forgotten Substations: The Power Behind the Subway; Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals; North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City; and Making Steinway: An American Workplace. Last month, Payne gave the School of Visual Art’s Ralph Caplan Memorial Lecture, and shortly afterward I reached out to him to talk about his most recent book, Made in America (Abrams), his long love affair with factories, and the photographic process.

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MCP: Martin C. Pedersen
CP: Christopher Payne

MCP: What drove your interest in factories?

CP: It was inspired by my experience photographing abandoned state mental hospitals for my book Asylum. The hospitals all functioned as self-sufficient communities, producing everything they needed on site, like food, water, power, and even clothing and shoes. For the book I tried to recreate a typical state hospital in its heyday, reconstructing a whole from parts gathered here and there: a bowling alley from New York, a theater from Connecticut, a shoe shop from Massachusetts, a slaughterhouse from North Carolina, etc. After Asylum was published in 2009, I stumbled on an old yarn mill in Maine that reminded me of the hospital workshops. While those places had long been abandoned, this mill was fully functional, a scene from the past coexisting miraculously with the present. From conversations with employees I learned of other mills around New England, remnants of a once-dominant industry that had moved south long ago, and then overseas, in search of cheap labor. I started photographing these old textile mills, and this project eventually broadened into Made in America.

MCP: Were you documenting their demise?

CP: Some places were barely holding on and had a definite forlorn look to them, while others were doing just fine, having survived by catering to a niche market that values the “genuine article” produced on vintage equipment. By contrast, the modern textile mills weren’t as photogenic.

MCP: The layers of time weren’t there.

CP: Yes, exactly. But sometimes these layers of time make for a very cluttered environment and challenging photographic conditions, which is why so many of my pictures now are dramatically lit, with the background fading into darkness. That said, of all my industrial work, the pictures that resonate most with people were made in these older factories and are of traditional, familiar subjects like pianos and pencils.

MCP: Let’s talk about the process of actually taking the pictures. Do you scout these places first and take preliminary shots on a cell phone and then come back with a bigger camera? How does it work?

CP: Ideally, I will scout with my cell phone, let the snapshots marinate for a few weeks or even months, and return later with my big camera. This is what I did at Steinway, General Pencil, and the New York Times Printing Plant—all long term personal projects that were close to home. But with editorial assignments I don’t usually have the luxury of time, and the entire creative process must be compressed into a few days. No matter how much research I do beforehand, there are always surprises: a production line might be down, or a particularly beautiful color might have already run the previous week, etc. I always feel a sense of urgency because nothing stays the same for very long on a factory floor. Big assembly lines can’t be stopped, and sometimes I watch things go by and realize I’m just not going to get it.

MCP: When you walk onto a factory floor, what are you looking for?

CP: When I walk into a factory for the first time—whether it’s new, old, large or small—I start searching for moments that are unique to that place. I’ve realized over the years that I don’t need to document every aspect of how something is made; I just need to focus on what’s essential—and beautiful. This could be an interesting part of the production process, a purposefully designed machine, or an employee immersed in their work.

MCP: Some modern factories look almost clinical, and microchip factories, known as “fabs,” look like giant operating rooms.

CP: That’s an apt comparison, especially since chip fabs are in fact much cleaner than operating rooms and filled with some of the most sophisticated machines on the planet. The giant lithography machines that etch circuit patterns onto the chips cost up to $180 million each and blast molten drops of tin with a laser 50,000 times a second. It’s a hidden process that I’ve always wanted to photograph, but not even the fab employees are allowed to open the machine!

MCP: Do you have a list of possible photos in your head or on paper that you go in with? Or is it looser than that?

CP: I do as much research as I can, but if it’s a little-known subject or one with proprietary concerns that is rarely photographed, I have to go in blind and trust my instincts. I was recently commissioned to photograph some robots for Scientific American, and I knew I would need to do something different than what had been done before. Luckily the story was already written, so I knew what message the pictures needed to convey to support the narrative, and that helped guide the creative process.

MCP: The factory shots are quite beautiful. But they’re not “ruin porn” because they’re still in use. What are you saying with these pictures, beyond their formal beauty? They’re beautiful as pictures, but so is a perfume ad. There’s a deeper meaning here. What’s that meaning?

CP: Beyond their formal beauty, my photographs are a celebration of the making of things, of the transformation of raw materials into useful objects, and the human skill and mechanical precision brought to bear on these materials that give them form and purpose. We all know what a pencil, piano, or an airplane looks like, but what happens when we peel back the facade and go deep into the choreography of production? I like the challenge of taking everyday, overlooked objects and elevating them to works of art by revealing them in a way that’s never been done before. I’m also thinking about how each picture relates back to the larger story I’m trying to tell about the importance of manufacturing in America, craftsmanship, and manual labor.

MCP: What about the people in the photos?

CP: Whenever possible I try to include people for scale and context, and sometimes a good portrait can stand in for a factory that is not very interesting or photogenic. Most of all, the people in my pictures are a celebration of teamwork and community. There are workers with soiled, stained hands, and others suited head to toe in clean protective gear—young and old, skilled and unskilled, recent immigrants and American-born men and women, side by side. These are the people who make the stuff that fuels our economy, and in this time of social polarization and increasing automation, they offer a glimmer of hope.

MCP: A printing plant is one of the few factories that I’ve been in. I will say, the workers were really proud of what they did. They took great pride in printing our magazine. 

CP: I loved watching the pressmen and women at the New York Times Printing Plant climb around the giant presses, carefully feeding the web of paper by hand through the print rollers, and the environmental portraits I made there are some of my favorite pictures. It is my aim to honor the workers and their skills, and thanks to the often repetitive nature of assembly line and factory work, I will watch and wait patiently for the peak moment of elegance. As Kathy Ryan said in the foreword to my book, “There is no excuse for not getting it right.”

MCP: It’s hard work.

CP: To be clear, there’s nothing romantic about manual labor; it is repetitive, often dull, low-paying, and physically demanding. But the majority of people I met take pride in what they do. Finding young people who can sew or want to learn a vocational trade, however, is another story and as big a challenge to a resurgence in American manufacturing as foreign competition. There has been much said about how immigrants have “stolen” manufacturing jobs, but it is clear from what I’ve seen that many of these factories would no longer be in business if it weren’t for the newly arrived labor pool to fill the void.

MCP: 

And yet, regardless of how tough and repetitive some of the jobs are, these jobs held communities together. When they left or were downsized, the places were less for it.

CP: When a factory closes, the surrounding community dies, as do the small industries that fed the factory. It’s a domino effect, because the skills needed to make those things are lost too, shipped overseas with the machinery. We’ve traded good jobs for low prices and are now dependent on foreign countries for essential goods. It’s a precarious position to be in, quite the opposite of what I saw at the state hospitals, which were all self-sufficient and seemed to serve as a better model for a more sustainable way of life.

In the last few years, the industrial landscape in America has been re-energized by pandemic supply-chain shortages, competition with China, national security issues, energy concerns, and federal legislation. The seismic shift to electric vehicles has been a windfall for car companies, which are scrambling to build new mega campuses and entirely new circular manufacturing ecosystems that combine production with battery recycling. For sure, consumer goods like apparel and electronics aren’t coming back anytime soon, but essential technologies like computer chips, perhaps the most complex products on earth, have become a priority of national security. We haven’t seen this kind of investment in the future in decades, and some of the newer factories I visited had the buzz of tech startups.

MCP: Obviously, the next wave has to be green manufacturing. You’ve photographed electric car plants. Talk about that experience.

CP: I visited both Rivian and Tesla, and the size of these factories was mind-boggling. The interiors seemed to stretch for as far as the eye could see, and a golf cart was needed to get around. Almost everything I saw at Tesla was proprietary, probably because that was back in 2017, while Rivian was much more relaxed and had the cool vibe of the “the new kid on the block.” In places so vast, the photographic possibilities are endless, but in reality, these new car plants look very much like the old ones; they’ve just swapped out internal combustion engines for electric motors and batteries. 

MCP: What are you working on these days? Do you have a new project?

CP: It has been many years since I photographed the small yarn mill in Maine that started me on this journey, but every time I step onto a factory floor I feel the same sense of excitement and possibility. There was only so much I could include in Made in America, so I’m already thinking about volume two. In the coming years, factories will continue to open and close as the manufacturing landscape changes and evolves. Without a doubt though, the ultra-modern places I’ve photographed for this book will themselves become outdated and replaced one day. It is one long continuum, hopefully, towards a brighter future.