Fundamental elements of globalised working and living environments, photographically documented: an artistic study of the quotidian as illustrated by global production facilities that operate allmineral machinery and, by extension, a photo atlas of postmodern living conditions. Over a period of eleven years, photographer Torsten Hattenkerl travelled to production plants scattered around the globe that operate machinery manufactured by allmineral, a specialist in the processing of gravel, sand, coal, and ore. As a photographer Hattenkerl’s gaze is both ethnographic and biographical, artistic and documentary in nature: objectively, but also sensitively and empathetically he seeks out visible structures and characteristics. In his photographs he captures the intertwined nature of work and life settings, natural and artistic landscapes, leisure and work environments, the mechanical and cultural technology which converge in corporations such as allmineral. He shows us harsh landscapes on the margins of urban civilisation that are also the point of origin of the resources themselves, and also the inevitable embeddedness of the machinery and processes impacting the landscape and the soil; after all, virtually every natural landscape has long since been ‘civilised’, even those far removed from major conurbations. Due to the intense editing of artist and art historian Marta Pohlmann-Kryszkiewicz, Hattenkerl´s work appears to have evolved a method for capturing, collecting, grading, and recombining basic elements and their setting in a synthetic-natural environment, in an artistically photographic way, much like allmineral’s separation processes themselves.

The essays in the book by media theorist David Sittler engage vividly in a constructive tension and in a dialogue with the photographs and their viewers as well as their own potential experiences. They are conceived less as an autonomous metaphorical textual fabric that seeks a dialogue-based interaction with the images themselves. The design of the book is by Luise Bartels.

Torsten Hattenkerl,* 1963 in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany. Lives and works in Leipzig, Germany.