October 04 - October 29, 2003

Peter MacCallum | Industrial Interiors | review

by Peter MacCallum

In this, the age of information, any photographer who choses to document heavy industrial subjects is presumed to be attempting to chronicle the end of a mythical "golden age of industry". This is not surprising, given the constant reports in the media about "de-industrialization" and job losses in the manufacturing sector. Many of us have even come to believe that our established industries are doomed to be replaced in the near future by some unspecified, information-based global service.

My own photography is based on a completely different premise. Because certain industrial processes are essential to urban civilization, they cannot be made redundant. It is my task to make these industries visible by documenting typical industrial worksites. The sites themselves are part of our technological and social evolution, embodying a vast body of accumulated expertise and practical ways of working that predate, and will no doubt survive, the digital revolution.

Rather than showing industrial sites as vast landscapes, as seen in the work of Ed Burtynsky, or as typological architecture, in the manner of Bernd and Hilla Becher, I have concentrated on photographing the unfamiliar interiors of industrial workplaces. In my view, it is the interior spaces that render the social nature of industry most clearly. And since every industrial site must continue to adapt or die, the interiors of an active plant often house abandoned elements from earlier stages of its development. I try to document these vanishing artifacts before the cutting torch begins its work.

CONCRETE INDUSTRIES

Anyone can produce a small amount of concrete for a backyard project. All that is required is a flat working surface, a bag of cement powder, some sand, crushed stone, a bucket of water and a shovel. Once mixed, the cement and water will react chemically, binding the sand and stone in adhesive cement paste, much as the flour binds the other ingredients in a fruit cake. Because of the irreversible and rapid nature of this hardening process, mixing concrete is by nature a local industry.

The problem of delivering metered amounts of freshly mixed concrete to building sites led in the 20th century to the development of the transit mixer, the large truck with a rotating drum commonly known as a "cement truck" . The transit mixer is possibly unique in the history of technology, being a transport vehicle that acts as a processing machine on the way to the job site. Transit mixers are dispatched from concrete batching plants located throughout Ontario.

The provision of the raw materials for concrete requires heavy resources to be organized on a regional basis. Crushed limestone is produced at several huge quarries on the Niagara Escarpment. Cement powder is manufactured in seven large plants in southern Ontario. Ships, barges, and rail cars are used to move cement from the plants to terminals around the Great Lakes region. Dry tanker trucks distribute cement to local concrete batching plants.

Making cement powder involves quarrying large quantities of limestone and clay or shale, grinding the materials to a fine dust, and heating them to 1,450 degrees Celsius. The heating is done in a rotary kiln, a blast furnace in the form of a long, inclined, brick-lined tube that rotates on its axis. In the hottest part of the kiln, the materials undergo a complex chemical reaction and fuse into irregular lumps called cement "clinker" . After cooling, the clinker is ground in a ball mill to make cement powder.

Between 1900 and about 1980, all cement plants used the "wet" process, in which the powdered raw materials were mixed with water and fed into the rotary kiln as a slurry. Because of the need to dry the raw materials before burning them, wet process kilns ranged from 400 to 600 feet in length. The plants of St. Marys Cement in St. Marys and St. Lawrence Cement in Mississauga, Ontario have long since converted to the vastly more efficient "dry" process, which uses a shorter kiln and a pre-heating tower. The abandoned wet process machinery shown in these photographs is gradually being demolished.

Acknowledgments

The artist would like to thank David DeBruine and Lou Misketis of Canada Building Materials; Bram Vermeullen, Shawn Sullivan, Pat Champion and Wayne Cousins of St. Marys Cement; Don Hopkins and Wayne Huska of Lafarge Canada; Richard Erdmann and Marjorie Thompson of Dufferin Aggregates, and Ed Orsini, Barbara Smith and Walter Heyden of St Lawrence Cement for their help on this project. Many current and former employees of the companies mentioned above also provided information and assistance. The project has been partially funded by a project grant from the Toronto Arts Council.