Manfred Hamm  
   
   

 

Pressespiegel / Press Review / Revue de Presse / Revista de la prensa

 
     
 

Rezensionen zur amerikanischen Ausgabe von “Tote Technik“ (1983):

Dead Tech: A Guide to the Archaeology of Tomorrow. Photographs by Manfred Hamm, text by Rolf Steinberg, translated by Michael Stone. Sierra Club Books (dist. by Random House), ISBN 0-87156-347-9
Bookshelf:
“Like Hamm’s pictures of industrial landscapes in Berlin in his earlier books Berlin – Landscapes of a City and Berlin – Monuments of an Industrial Landscape, they reveal something of the shift to postmodernist perceptions.”

 
     
  Publishers Weekly:
“In decay, the feats of engineering – cars, fighter bombers, steam engines – look like the corroded skeletons of mythical creatures of the machine age, and their inexorable existence seems a flagrant testament to a dilapidated civilization that adulates haste and disposability. In Hamm’s photographs, these mortuaries look exotic and frightening, grotesque bits of archeology for some future civilization.”
 
     
 

Chattanooga Times:
“To me the most impressive section was a series on old launch complexes at Cape Canaveral. It is astounding that the Space Age already has abandoned relics. Some of the early launch pads look like 1,000-year-old ruins out of Star Wars, and are as totemic as Stonehenge.” [Ned Pratt]

 
     
  Toronto Globe:
“The pictures show us a landscape of desolation, a panorama dedicated to the art of anti-esthetics. Yet Hamm can sometimes find a forlorn beauty even in decay, en the melancholy vistas of modern ruins.” [William French]
 
     
  Library Journal:
“The black-and-white photographs are tonally even, holding detail while capturing their subjects in a still, quiet air – an atmospheric calmness the industrial giants would never have witnessed.” [Dennis L. Dollens]
 
     
  The Whig-Standard:
“In photos whose beauty contrasts starkly with the unsightliness of their subjects, debris takes on the proportions of Greek tragedy.”
 
     
  Not Man Apart:
“Hamm captures the dreamy and ghostly quality of the relics, which contain the dreams of their inventors and the ghosts of inventions that were used, discarded, and forgotten. There is little, save these photos, to mark the passage of these technologies through this world into the next.” [Robert Schaeffer]