Ruins, to quote Chateaubriand, provide “a secret conformity between those destroyed monuments and the fleetingness of our own existence.” But distinct from the archaeological remains of Classical civilizations, the ruins of Modernity are unsettling, their obsolete emblems and functions bearing an ominous reminder of history slipping through the fingers of our own lifetimes. As the grand structures of the industrial age descend into entropy, they occupy an uneasy afterlife. This “modern imaginary of ruins”,  in the words of Andreas Huyssen, “articulates the nightmare of the Enlightenment that all history might ultimately be overwhelmed by nature.” Not the worn masonry lying in the lone and level sands, but the buddleia growing in the concrete of Robert Smithson’s abandoned set of futures.

These landscapes, architecture and structures of the industrial age, descending into entropy, occupy an uneasy afterlife. Photography’s macabre way of instantly creating an impression of the past makes it entropy’s natural parasite; forensically recording the patina encroaching on past might, the dust of our own passing settling into the stillness and silence of its silver. Writ large in the fingerprint detail of these tableau photographs, their minutiae is as much an acute observation of decline as it is a temporal suspension of the remorseless march of time.