Photography and Industrial Heritage

Industrial heritage and photography have a close relationship. Photography is a source for industrial archaeology. It sheds light on the links between people, their tools, their machines and their workplaces. Once the industrial activity is over, photography is also a tool for documenting and studying the sites. But far beyond that, captured by artists capable of transcending common representations, conferring on industrial remains the ugliness of an era that was thought to be over, photography has made it possible to reveal the aesthetic force and thus to allow the qualification as heritage of neglected objects and buildings. In doing so, by evacuating the memories of dominations and struggles, photography runs the risk of fetishising a heritage reduced to its plastic dimensions. It is these different perspectives that the workshop seeks to explore.