Interview with Harald Finster, Photographer

The work of Har­ald Fin­ster is focused yet diverse. His body of work is the kind of col­lec­tion one could spend hours upon hours gaz­ing into and still want more at the end (at least I could). I con­tacted Fin­ster a few weeks back hop­ing he would agree to an inter­view on his work, meth­ods, and insights.  For­tu­nately, he warmly accepted. Enjoy.

TM: Har­ald, Thanks so much for tak­ing the time to talk to me. I really appre­ci­ate your fas­ci­na­tion with indus­trial instal­la­tions. You’ve men­tioned in other inter­views that you’ve had this curios­ity and won­der from an early age. I’m won­der­ing, now that you’re pre­sum­ably more mature than the child you once were, do you try to bring that early child-like curios­ity and imag­i­na­tion into the work?

HF: This is cer­tainly an aspect of my work, yes. Dis­cov­er­ing indus­trial sites is partly dri­ven by curiosity. Finding new struc­tures or unknown com­plex machin­ery is fas­ci­nat­ing. I try to imag­ine how processes might have worked and who might have done his duty in a derelict work­shop for exam­ple. In most cases I do some research in order to answer the “how did it work” ques­tion, but the “who did the work” ques­tion remains unan­swered in most cases and remains open to imagination.

TM: So, in a way, you develop your own cast of characters. Do you ever encounter peo­ple who worked in the places you’ve pho­tographed? What kind of response to your work do you get from them?

HF: Indeed, I got response from peo­ple who worked in these places. The reac­tions var­ied from sheer sur­prise that some­one might be inter­ested to pho­to­graph “ugly” places like steel­works or coke plants to a cer­tain rude­ness that some­one val­ued the place and the work. When I pho­tographed a wind­ing tower in the Ruhr area a few years ago, an older man passed and shouted, “It’s about time they demol­ish this damn old thing. I have been work­ing in this damn pit for over 30 years and I’m tired of look­ing at it.” Five min­utes later another man passed by and was very pleased that I took pho­tographs and told me about the “good old times” when he still worked in the col­liery. I even devel­oped good friend­ship and exten­sive inter­change of ideas with steel­work­ers. One of them, Markus Grün­thaler, con­tributed some great, almost poetic text (unfor­tu­nately it’s only in German) to my website. Getting in touch with co-workers of indus­trial plants is a very impor­tant aspect of my work, because it keeps my work rooted and out of the ivory towers.

TM: You’ve described your own work as evolv­ing from a purely doc­u­men­tary inten­tion to includ­ing more of an artis­tic inter­est in your sub­jects; and yet, you’ve stated that you reject “the abuse of indus­trial instal­la­tions as vehi­cles for pseudo-intellectual work.” Could you elab­o­rate on this? Is there a room for actual intel­lec­tual inter­pre­ta­tion in your work?

HF: Most peo­ple say that pure doc­u­men­ta­tion and art are con­tra­dic­tory. They claim that art should express emo­tions, indi­vid­ual per­spec­tives and should be more than just a “math­e­mat­i­cal model of the real world” (a per­fect doc­u­men­tary pho­to­graph could be con­sid­ered such a model). This is wrong in my opin­ion. A pho­to­graph that fol­lows the for­mal rules of a doc­u­men­tary pho­to­graph CAN be art. The ques­tion is: why has this pho­to­graph been taken? For exam­ple, if an image was cap­tured to demon­strate the sig­nif­i­cance of an object, [that image] could exceed the pure tech­ni­cal facts about the object to con­vey a mes­sage. That mes­sage could be some­thing like, “Look, this head­frame is a sig­nif­i­cant part of your coun­try.” The artis­tic con­tri­bu­tion of pho­tog­ra­phers like Peter Weller or Bernd and Hilla Becher is that they called atten­tion to a rel­e­vant part of our soci­ety, which was almost com­pletely out of artis­tic scope. The fact that they ele­vated the topic of indus­trial archi­tec­ture into the “artis­tic sphere,” indi­cates that they had the intu­ition and sen­si­tiv­ity to feel the impor­tance of this topic. Thus they are artists.

Per­son­ally, my first goal was to pre­serve what was in dan­ger of dis­ap­pear­ing for myself. This is a very per­sonal moti­va­tion. I felt that peo­ple were wip­ing out what I con­sider my home, my per­sonal roots, my beau­ti­ful indus­trial home­land. Show­ing the beauty of indus­trial archi­tec­ture and instal­la­tions is there­fore an impor­tant aspect of my work. Again, the doc­u­men­tary approach seems to be appro­pri­ate. If peo­ple ask why I refuse to sug­ar­coat my pho­tographs, why I don’t brighten up the col­ors, why I don’t use artis­tic light­ing to make [these] ugly objects look nicer, my answer is that this would be dis­hon­est and would not do my objects jus­tice. I want peo­ple to look closer in order to dis­cover the inher­ent aes­thet­ics of indus­trial instal­la­tions. Indus­trial build­ings, blast fur­naces and machin­ery also express inven­tive tal­ent, the efforts of engi­neers and archi­tects and excel­lent crafts­man­ship. This should be hon­ored, and my pho­tographs allow this expression.

TM: What I hear you sug­gest­ing is that despite the very ratio­nal and purely func­tional nature of these indus­trial objects and places, there’s an emo­tional con­nec­tion made to them, par­tic­u­larly by those that worked with and in these arti­facts. Is this some­thing you feel that you and oth­ers who are drawn to this kind of sub­ject pick-up on in ele­vat­ing indus­trial archi­tec­ture to the artis­tic sphere (aside from your own nostalgia)?

HF: Yes, exactly! There is an emo­tional con­nec­tion between the peo­ple work­ing in and liv­ing around indus­trial instal­la­tions. This con­nec­tion may be pos­i­tive, i.e. pride in the work or close com­rade­ship, espe­cially found in dan­ger­ous places like iron­works or coalmines. On the other hand peo­ple should never for­get that work in indus­try is also con­nected with neg­a­tive emo­tions and hardships.

I often won­der, why the spawn of an insane king, like Neuschwanstein Cas­tle, is praised as art whereas inge­nious machin­ery and indus­trial archi­tec­ture, which is a per­fect syn­the­sis of form and func­tion­al­ity, are doomed as eye­sores. In a way, I con­sider tech­ni­cal mon­u­ments as art. My con­tri­bu­tion is to make this obvi­ous to more people.

Lastly, peo­ple should not for­get that some places are the last rest­ing place of work­ers who never returned home from their shift.

TM: I agree on your point about dress­ing up your sub­jects. It’s all there, already, but you’re not sim­ply walk­ing in and ran­domly shoot­ing. For me, the inter­est­ing thing about the doc­u­men­tary approach is that there is already a great deal of drama embed­ded in the sub­ject. The con­trasts of light and shadow, tex­tural vari­a­tions, and con­cep­tu­ally, the jux­ta­po­si­tion of pro­duc­tion and destruc­tion, are pow­er­ful ele­ments that jump of the pho­to­graph, at least to me. Do you feel oth­ers see that?

HF: [My posi­tion] is in con­trast to offi­cial polit­i­cal main­stream. Let me give an exam­ple: Essen and the Ruhr area will be “Kul­turhaupt­stadt Europa 2010″ (Cap­i­tal of Cul­ture 2010). The offi­cial pam­phlet says “Die Iden­tität dieser Metro­pole ist nicht mehr geprägt von Arbeit, son­dern von Kul­tur” (the iden­tity of this metrop­o­lis is no longer char­ac­ter­ized by work, but by cul­ture). This state­ment declares an antag­o­nism between work and cul­ture. It expresses the arro­gance of the author­i­ties and the pow­er­ful who feel them­selves supe­rior to the work­ing class, if you per­mit me to use this old-fashioned term. They deny the mer­its of mil­lions of peo­ple, who laid the ground for our wel­fare. These are the sorts of peo­ple who abuse indus­trial instal­la­tions as vehi­cles. They can­not deny the exis­tence of indus­trial archi­tec­ture (although they do the best to wipe out as much of it as pos­si­ble), but they try to per­vert the orig­i­nal mean­ing of the instal­la­tions. They add futur­is­tic archi­tec­tural ele­ments, they pull out his­toric machin­ery to make the inte­rior look “nice and mod­ern” and they turn for­mer work­places into mean­ing­less Disney-Land like amuse­ment parks. They paint a dis­torted image of our his­tory. My pho­tographs attempt to cor­rect this image.

Using the doc­u­men­tary form under­lines my attempt to com­mu­ni­cate a cor­rect and undis­torted image. Politi­cians and their handy­men turn authen­tic mon­u­ments into some­thing dif­fer­ent. It is impor­tant to under­line the ambi­gu­ity of the word, dif­fer­ent. The trans­for­ma­tion of the indus­trial land­scape into some­thing dif­fer­ent has no rec­og­niz­able goal, no direc­tion, no roadmap. I don’t denounce trans­for­ma­tion, but trans­for­ma­tion requires a goal, an under­ly­ing con­cept, which must be more than, “we want change.” What I call the “pseudo intel­lec­tual elite” dis­re­gards the his­toric roots of our indus­trial soci­ety. They want to make a change, but they can’t offer new con­cepts leav­ing us [uprooted]. My pho­tographs are intended as a con­tri­bu­tion, per­haps a small one, to pre­serve an authen­tic image of our indus­trial roots.

TM: I think I under­stand you point, but these objects and places, though they have his­tory, may be under­stood as raw mate­ri­als in their own right, like any other resource, that are appro­pri­ated for new pur­poses, such a wood, stone, etc. Is it the pre­vi­ously embed­ded human asso­ci­a­tion with these indus­trial set­tings that makes the dif­fer­ence here? So, I have to ask, what do you think those con­cepts and goals for trans­for­ma­tion should be? What’s your vision for their reuse, or pre­served decay perhaps?

HF: I agree with you. The work and spirit of the peo­ple who trans­formed raw mate­ri­als into tech­ni­cal and archi­tec­tural mon­u­ments does dis­tin­guish [these places and objects] from anony­mous soul­less mat­ter. All the efforts and cre­ativ­ity flown into machin­ery and build­ings should be appre­ci­ated. Reusing aban­doned indus­trial places should be done with respect. Pre­serv­ing indus­trial mon­u­ments in their orig­i­nal state is still the best solu­tion in my opin­ion. Most peo­ple retort that it is not pos­si­ble to pre­serve hun­dreds of use­less indus­trial sites. How­ever, how do they jus­tify thou­sands of churches, town halls, and cas­tles, many of them with ques­tion­able artis­tic value, are pre­served as so-called tourist attrac­tions whereas indus­trial mon­u­ments which formed the foun­da­tions of our cul­ture are con­sid­ered worthless?

TM: Inter­est­ing point. You men­tioned the dis­ap­pear­ance of these indus­trial places and objects as the moti­va­tion behind your ini­tial doc­u­men­tary efforts.  Surely, the same could be said of main­stream preser­va­tion­ists.  Is this still your pri­mary moti­va­tion?  Do you have a dif­fer­ent atti­tude toward work that’s the only remain­ing preser­va­tion of a place com­pared to the work in which the place still exists?

HF: There are two aspects: one of them is the pho­to­graphic preser­va­tion. If I look at a pho­to­graph show­ing a lost place, it brings back mem­o­ries, it allows me to plunge into a lost world. This makes images of lost places valu­able for me from a sub­jec­tive point of view. The other aspect is that I want to give these objects a voice. I want to let them speak to the peo­ple by means of these pho­tographs, regard­less of the [offi­cial] preser­va­tion sta­tus of a place.

TM: There have been sev­eral inci­dents where indus­trial build­ings and com­plexes have been reha­bil­i­tated for new and dif­fer­ent uses. Here in New York, we have the High Line, for­merly an aban­doned ele­vated rail line along Manhattan’s west side, that recently reopened as a promenade. I under­stand that in the case of the defunct places you’ve pho­tographed some have been con­verted to muse­ums, is that cor­rect? What’s your atti­tude toward this kind of con­ver­sion of use in rela­tion to pre­serv­ing these places as you see them?

HF: Yes, you are cor­rect. Some of the places have been pre­served as muse­ums or have been con­verted for reuse. Muse­ums are a good way to keep our indus­trial her­itage alive as long as his­toric facts are the focus of a museum. The for­mer Berin­gen col­liery is an excel­lent exam­ple for this. About 80 – 90 per­cent of the build­ings have been pre­served. There are almost no addi­tions and the site looks almost as if the last miner would have left the pit yesterday.

In con­trast, the Zol­lverein coke plant and col­liery, a UNESCO world her­itage mon­u­ment by the way, has suf­fered a lot from mil­lions of Euros pumped into this pres­ti­gious project. In large part, it has been trans­formed into some­thing dif­fer­ent, the kind of mean­ing­less dif­fer­ent I talked about ear­lier. Con­ver­sion for reuse is not an ideal solu­tion but cer­tainly bet­ter than demo­li­tion. I admit that it is impos­si­ble to freeze the sta­tus of indus­trial instal­la­tions for­ever and that some kind of preser­va­tion work or devel­op­ment is required.This is ben­e­fi­cial only as long as the work is car­ried out with respect for the place.

TM: Archi­tects are noto­ri­ous for stag­ing pho­tographs of their work prior to their open­ing or use.  I’ve known some to bring their own fur­ni­ture in, shoot, and clear out before the owner of the project moves their fur­nish­ings in. Do you approach indus­trial places that are aban­doned dif­fer­ently from those that are in operation?

HF: As long as I shoot exte­ri­ors the approach does not dif­fer sig­nif­i­cantly. Tak­ing pic­tures on active plants often imposes restric­tions due to safety rea­sons, e.g. poi­son gas at blast fur­nace plants, but the gen­eral approach is the same. If I shoot inte­ri­ors, I am forced to think dif­fer­ently, indeed. Tak­ing pho­tographs in active plants requires that I under­stand the process very quickly. Most active plants are filled with extremely com­plex instal­la­tions. The chal­lenge is to visu­ally extract the rel­e­vant parts in order to cre­ate images which are both aes­thetic and mean­ing­ful, i.e. depict the process.

Tak­ing pho­tographs of inte­ri­ors at aban­doned places is dif­fer­ent. If the machin­ery has been taken out, I can show the pure archi­tec­ture. This is ideal from the aes­thetic point of view, but of course, pho­tographs of empty spaces do not show the whole story.

The same is true if only part of the machin­ery is left. In some cases, a fac­tory hall becomes a kind of stage for these remain­ing actors.

TM: Your night pho­tographs are par­tic­u­larly illus­tra­tive of activ­ity that occurs in oper­at­ing facil­i­ties, whereas the images of the same places taken dur­ing the day wouldn’t likely con­vey this.  Was this a con­scious deci­sion, or was there some­thing else you were try­ing to achieve with these night shots?

HF: To be hon­est, tak­ing night shots was and still is not in the cen­ter of my spot­light. The sub­ject is more a hobby within a hobby than an ambi­tious artis­tic project.

TM: I see, but I guess what I’m try­ing to get at is if there’s a par­tic­u­lar under­stand­ing you receive from see­ing both? You have to admit, there’s a dis­tinct pres­ence of action in one ver­sus the other. I don’t mean to bela­bor the point, but there seems to be a rela­tion­ship between these sep­a­rate means of see­ing and, say, for exam­ple, the dif­fer­ence between an indus­trial instal­la­tion pre­served as a museum as opposed to being reused as a theme park.

HF: Night shots of active plants cer­tainly under­line the fact that there is activ­ity. As an exam­ple the extremely long expo­sure time of my Weir­ton night shot shows the traces of mov­ing vehi­cles, i.e. activ­ity. The black and white day­light shots of the same site would prob­a­bly look almost equal regard­less of the state of the plant, because this kind of pho­tographs has a strong focus on shapes and struc­tures, whereas night shots empha­size move­ments and contrasts.

In Ger­many, illu­mi­nat­ing indus­trial theme parks at night became pop­u­lar at the Land­schaftspark Duis­burg (a for­mer Thyssen blast fur­nace plant). This kind of illu­mi­na­tion is com­pletely dif­fer­ent. It is a fan­ci­ful event and unre­lated to the orig­i­nal sub­stance. It is dis­tort­ing and sug­ar­coats. It draws atten­tion to a super­fi­cial instal­la­tion and away from the authen­tic object. You will never find a pho­to­graph of this type of kitsch in my collection.

TM: When you’re shoot­ing, do you set out to achieve a par­tic­u­lar result, i.e. more doc­u­men­tary or artis­tic?  In other words, how struc­tured are your goals for any given sub­ject?  Do you say, “This is going to be a more doc­u­men­tary shoot,” or do you adapt from shot to shot?”

HF: When I approach a new instal­la­tion, my first goal is to under­stand the story the build­ing or plant wants to tell me. I have to choose the appro­pri­ate tech­niques to trans­fer this story to my pho­tographs. As an exam­ple, a build­ing with a very rigid archi­tec­ture requires a strictly doc­u­men­tary form whereas a more com­plex build­ing allows me more pho­to­graphic freedom.

TM: Your inter­est in the indus­trial objects and/or place reflects a curios­ity at many scales, from the tex­ture and col­orations of rusted metal to the con­tex­tual rela­tion­ship between an indus­trial instal­la­tion and the larger land­scape in which it is sit­u­ated.  Do you go about work­ing from the inside out or vice versa?

HF: Ide­ally, I would like to work from out­side in, because slowly approach­ing a site allows me to catch the spirit, to lis­ten to the instal­la­tion and to get its story. Prac­ti­cally, this is not always pos­si­ble due to restric­tions con­cern­ing access, time, etc. In gen­eral, you might be sur­prised about the influ­ence of sim­ple prac­ti­cal con­straints on my work.

TM: Yes, it seems you are very much aware of those in the pho­tographs them­selves, but it doesn’t come across as an antag­o­niz­ing ele­ment. It’s like there’s a quiet acknowl­edg­ment of those prac­ti­cal con­straints, much like the sub­jects them­selves. Is this ever some­thing you wish to exceed, or do you see it as a mean­ing­ful aspect of your work?

HF: I would really like to exceed some of the prac­ti­cal con­straints. Frankly, restricted time is one of the most lim­it­ing fac­tors of my work. On the other hand prac­ti­cal lim­i­ta­tions can become the icing on the cake. A close and pointed pho­to­graph of a machine seg­re­gates the object from the sur­round­ing plant and trans­forms [it] into a sculp­ture, whereas an image that includes [other] ele­ments depicts the machine as part of a [larger] com­plex installation.

TM: The work is quite exten­sive and has a cer­tain mul­ti­plic­ity in respect to its cat­e­go­riza­tion.  I’m curi­ous about the way in which you con­nect your own work across its many sub­jects, across the dif­fer­ent scales and frames, and between objects and the spaces they form.  I would seem there are many iter­a­tions that could be derived despite such a nar­rowly focused sub­ject. Do you look for pre­vi­ously hid­den con­nec­tions in your past work or between what you may be work­ing on now and pre­vi­ous work?

HF: I find it increas­ingly fas­ci­nat­ing to dis­cover that a seem­ingly “nar­rowly focused” sub­ject like indus­trial pho­tog­ra­phy is becom­ing an end­less field of work with huge com­plex­ity and great mul­ti­plic­ity. Some facets of this are reflected in the diver­sity of my pho­tographs, but I still feel that I have hardly scratched the sur­face. In fact, the com­plex­ity of indus­trial instal­la­tions and processes requires a cer­tain insight into the under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy in order to struc­ture the “chaos.” Con­cern­ing this aspect, I am still in the learn­ing process. Many of my early pho­tographs are hid­den in the attic, because I did not man­age to get a deeper under­stand­ing of my sub­jects and shot numer­ous “nice but mean­ing­less” pic­tures with insuf­fi­cient knowl­edge. Very often I was over­whelmed by the vast com­plex­ity of a plant and attempted to cap­ture as much as pos­si­ble but missed the real spirit of the sub­ject. As an exam­ple: If you look at my head­frames in the Ruhr area which have been pho­tographed in the 1990’s you will find a rel­a­tively large col­lec­tion of images which are not really satisfactory. This is more like a stamp-collection, which was dri­ven by the goal to get them all. I am still inter­ested in the sub­ject of head­frames, but I am dri­ven by the desire to under­stand them.

TM: That’s a sig­nif­i­cant dis­tinc­tion, under­stand­ing your sub­jects ver­sus cat­a­logu­ing them. It implies such col­lect­ing was nec­es­sary to your devel­op­ment and appre­ci­a­tion of these head­frames. There’s a par­al­lel then that one could draw between the devel­op­ment of your own artistic/documentary capac­ity and the public’s redis­cov­ery and appre­ci­a­tion of these indus­trial instal­la­tions themselves.

HF: Yes, col­lect­ing items does cer­tainly help to get a cer­tain insight into the struc­ture of the mat­ter. If you com­pare seem­ingly sim­i­lar head­frames you will notice many small dif­fer­ences and ask your­self, “Why are they dif­fer­ent?” You will [then] learn to dis­tin­guish head­frames in France from those Wales. For exam­ple, you will dis­cover the tiny details that dis­tin­guish an old-fashioned inflex­i­ble Tom­son head­frame from the more mod­ern jointed Klönne type. This knowl­edge allows me to accen­tu­ate the char­ac­ter­is­tics of [spe­cific] indus­trial instal­la­tions. As the proverb goes, “Man liebt, was man kennt,” one could con­clude that the public’s accep­tance of indus­trial mon­u­ments is partly related to [their] increas­ing knowledge.

TM: You’ve also posted some record­ings of these indus­trial places on your web­site. How does this audi­tory com­po­nent (lis­ten) fig­ure into your visual work?  In other words, you’ve extracted images and sound form a sin­gle source so to speak, and cur­rently they have an exis­tence sep­a­rate from each other.  This may be con­sid­ered quite doc­u­men­tary in nature. As an artist, do you see these things get­ting processed into a recon­sti­tuted work?

HF: Long before the Inter­net was avail­able to every­one, I cre­ated my first audio-visual slideshow “StahlArt.” The show con­sisted of approx­i­mately 350 6x6 slides and a com­bi­na­tion of orig­i­nal sound record­ings and music. So, as you can see, I was always inter­ested in cap­tur­ing the whole image. In many cases, I would also love to cap­ture the smell! The “StahlArt” slideshow was quite a sub­jec­tivist project and mostly based on my early work. I am think­ing about a new “StahlArt” which imple­ments exactly what you sug­gest, but I am still uncer­tain about the appro­pri­ate form, which should com­mu­ni­cate more than just a sequence of nice and atmos­pheric pictures.

TM: I love the idea of being able to express the smell of these places! Yes, it seems there’s another rich ter­ri­tory that is at once beyond your cur­rent body of work while at the same time depen­dent on it. One thought I had came from an unre­lated expe­ri­ence I had in South­east Asia. After the 2004 Tsunami, local artists were invited to do instal­la­tions among the ruins, in some cases on or part of the ruins. The dif­fer­ence there was far less doc­u­men­tary, except in a very emo­tional sense. In con­trast, I think your work actu­ally ben­e­fits from the remote­ness of its pre­sen­ta­tion. I could eas­ily see film as pro­vid­ing a syn­the­siz­ing agent in your work.

Finally, What’s next?

HF:  I’m work­ing on a new “StahlArt”, which is more a rethink­ing of the con­cept behind the pre­sen­ta­tion of my work. I’ll be shoot­ing more Ger­man and Aus­trian steel­works in order to com­plete my “col­lec­tion of stamps” so to speak.  And, I am still hop­ing that my life’s dream might become true one day: a visit to the Ukraine, one of the few coun­tries in the world that still oper­ate open hearth furnaces.

TM:  Well, thanks for shar­ing your thoughts with me, Har­ald. It’s been a great con­ver­sa­tion and I really appre­ci­ate the time and insight you’ve pro­vided. Best of luck get­ting to the Ukraine.