Customer Reviews

Dead Tech. A Guide to the Archaeology of Tomorrow

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Dead Tech -A Guide to the Archaeology of Tomorrow dates from 1981, with the English version in 1982 and a 2000 reprinting. Its coverage of dead factories, rail-yards, harbors, and aircraft boneyards is a disappointment. Manfred Hamm's inconsistent mixture of black & white and color photographs give the book a disjointed feeling. The quality of the photographs themselves is inconsistent. A few rise to the level art exhibited by Stanley Greenberg (Invisible New York) and Christopher Payne (New York's Forgotten Substations), while most are no better than I (a decidedly amateur photographer) might have done in a hurry with my trusty Pentax K1000 and a roll of T-Max 100 or Ektachrome 64. The accompanying text by Rolf Steinberg is noisome -- perhaps a victim of a less-than-artful translation into English. I haven't yet decided whether I will hold on to this book.

I just got this book today. I flipped through it and was not at all impressed with the photography. Any amateur could take those shots. Then I started to read it. The first section of text, "The Ruins Complex" by Robert Jungk is terrible. As a scientist I was unspeakably annoyed at his melodramatic, disparaging attitude towards R&D and his overall theme that all technology is facing imminent breakdown resulting in possible inconvenience but more likely disaster. Throw this book on your coffee table if you want visitors to think you have poor tastes. On top of it all, the book seems to be poorly bound. My copy looks to be in excellent condition but I can see the thread holding the pages in and it feels like its going to come apart every time I flip a page. Skip it, its not worth even the shipping costs.

I bought this book because i recognized the "Military Aircraft Storage and Disposition Center" (near Tucson) as the airfield which becomes a huge artwork in DeLillo's great novel Underworld.

Not so much an addition to the budding photo-genre of Urban Ruins, as a picture of how our industrial age is going to look to the denizens of the age subsequent, whatever they will call it.

It is good to think on these things, amidst our ongoing welter of tiny crises & incessant static; the text makes all the implicit politics overt, but can be dispensed with.

I like the casualness of the photographs themselves: not Ansel Adams but a tad arch, pseudo-touristy. As if they were bound toward some fiercer rendezvous, & happened to have a day free.

As perhaps they are.

m.

Manfred Hamm took these photos in the late Seventies for this book that was initially published in 1981 in Germany. Some of what he captured has no doubt gone: the old steam engines in Wales; sunken harbors in Manhattan; the Royal Navy Ark Royal aircraft carrier; coal and steel works in the Ruhr but this still leaves plenty of industrial detritus scattered around the US and Europe. Similar photos could be taken today of course.

I've always enjoyed looking through these photos. The subject matter obviously lends itself to strong shapes and contrasts, especially when the `tech' gradually merges into the natural environment over the years. A stunning shot on page eighty-eight shows a very neglected highway and metal bridge in the first stages of vegetation taking over. The four photos of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, like any large vessel, produces wonderfully strong images of twisted metal, miles of cable and tubing. Page sixty-three has a strong photo of several engineering dials fixed to a control panel from the carrier Eagle.

Each of the nine chapters has some interesting background text to the relevant photos and Robert Jungk writes, what I thought, was a rather rambling introduction. Though the photos are printed in a relatively coarse 150 screen the elegant layout, with one photo a page, works well for the viewer.

This sort of subject matter pulls photographers in like a magnet. Troy Paiva explored dead tech and abandoned commercial buildings with some beautiful color work in Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration photographed in the western US.

***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

Some of the photography is of amateur quality, and some of the text is inessential. But on the whole, this is a good set of photos (from the early 1980s) of decaying industrial sites. Pick it up at a low price and you'll be happy with it!

Don't listen to the negative reviews of Dead Tech. We each have our individual tastes and apparently this book is not for everyone. I am a graduate student studing art and I ran across this book at a local book store and it is wonderful. Everyone I show this to wants to buy it. I am very interested in Industry and Post Industrail Archaeology and if you are into topics of the sort then you will find this book facinating. Hamm documents industrial decay and the left overs of industry long gone. It is ghostly, dreary and full of amazing forms. It shows that we never really clean up our messes and documents nature taking these forms back. Great Book, Nuff said. G

I found this book pretty, but it had alot of words in it. I was hoping for more photography. The pictures is does contain are stunning, powerful and very, very "Dead Tech".