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Mills and Factories of New England
Serge Hambourg (photographs)
*Mills and Factories of New England* collects ninety color photographs by the French photographer Serge Hambourg, published by Harry N. Abrams in 1988 with essays by Noel Perrin and Kenneth Breisch. Hambourg began photographing the region's old mill and factory buildings in 1982, and his images treat these workhorses of the Industrial Revolution as architecture worth serious looking: whitewashed clapboard sheds with wavy-paned windows, severe brick blocks strung along Massachusetts rivers, granite edifices squinting through clerestory light. There is elegy in the project - many of these buildings were obsolete or endangered - but no sentimentality; Hambourg's eye is cool, composed, and attentive to structure. For readers interested in photography, industrial history, or the vanishing built landscape of New England, it is a handsome and quietly serious book.
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The artist
Serge Hambourg is a French photographer who, after moving to the United States, turned his lens on New England's industrial architecture beginning in 1982. His mill photographs entered the collection of Dartmouth's Hood Museum, which exhibited them in 1988.
The book
Published by Abrams in 1988, the volume gathers ninety of Hambourg's color photographs of New England mills and factories, framed by essays from the writer Noel Perrin and the architectural historian Kenneth Breisch. The buildings are shot inside and out, as both working spaces and formal objects.
How it has aged
As many of these structures have since been demolished or converted, the book has gained value as a record. It sits in the American tradition of dignifying industrial and vernacular architecture through the camera.
For more context
Pair it with the industrial photography of the Bechers, or with histories of the New England textile mills and their decline.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Serge Hambourg (photographs)
- Publisher
- Harry N. Abrams
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1988
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine
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