The Brooklyn Rail

Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne, a solo exhibition now on view at the Cooper Hewitt, is, in the photographer’s own words, “a celebration of the making of things.” Indeed, in his visits to American factories, Payne has documented machinery, workers, techniques, and the materials of manufacture—but as the era of workers making things in America draws to a close, we might ask what these photographs really represent. Those of us who lived through some portion of the industrial age’s apotheosis, and enjoyed the surfeit of manufactured products it provided, were taught by photography to admire the power and promise of technology and industry. In newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and corporate annual reports, photography shaped our image of factories and, with it, our admiration for them.

Industrial photography has long celebrated repetition, scale, and precision. Early factory photographs, however static and posed, established a vocabulary of order and colossal scale. Photographs made in 1913 at the Ford plant where moving assembly lines for automobile manufacturing were first implemented illustrated the potential of mass production: rows of men stand at their work stations; ranks of identical car chassis and bodies recede diagonally into depth, a compositional formula that would be repeated for decades. For the rest of the twentieth century, photography hewed to variations of this theme. Precision machinery, dedicated workers, and reverence for mass production were the order of the day. Year after year, industry was presented as orderly, powerful, and abundant. Rows of identical fuselages, artillery shells, tanks, and bombs receding in clear perspective signified national strength. During World War II, such imagery functioned as both documentation and propaganda, suggesting that America’s manufacturing capacity would secure victory and, afterward, prosperity. That celebration of industrial promise remains visible in Payne’s work.

What distinguishes Payne’s photographs is not their departure from this tradition but their refinement of it. Equipped with contemporary cameras capable of extraordinary fidelity, he renders machinery and materials with remarkable clarity. The large-scale prints at Cooper Hewitt are impeccably sharp, their lighting meticulous. They present vignettes of the American factory worker making products that, in an era when “Made in USA” carried particular weight, ranked among the best in the world. Payne’s photographs attain that kind of excellence, exalting the act of manufacture itself.

Repetition and pronounced perspective recur throughout the exhibition. Peeps Marshmallow Chicks winding along a conveyor belt in a gentle S-curve have immediate appeal—nostalgic to some, ironic to others. Payne’s low, raking light defines their brilliant yellow forms and casts complementary shadows that give each confection sculptural presence. The range of manufacturing on view spans eras, from antique pencil- and hat-making machinery to advanced aerospace and technological production.

Payne does not simply record what he encounters. Many images are lit with his own equipment, isolating the foreground subject and allowing the background to fall into black, eliminating the visual clutter typical of factory interiors. Consider Tremonde Gaines polishing a Bridgestone 59/80R63 tire during final inspection (2025), which pictures a tire so immense that the man standing inside its rim appears Lilliputian, visible only from the chest up as he applies a die grinder to the surface. Payne’s lighting emphasizes the molded patterns and cavities of the tread; the tire becomes a thing of beauty.

A similar stillness appears in Ron Folmsbee inspecting a low-pressure steam turbine rotor (2023). The rotor is magnificent, its sheen and complex structure crisply defined. As in the tire photograph, the object is extraordinary to behold. The worker beneath it, however, stands stiffly. Payne’s electronic flash freezes movement and eliminates blur. Despite the premise of showing people at work, in this image, as in others in the exhibition, the worker does not appear to be actively engaged or absorbed in labor. Instead, he seems posed to demonstrate his task. I am reminded of Lewis Hine’s 1921 photograph Steamfitter, an image of a worker flexing like a bodybuilder as he turns a massive wrench. Though clearly staged, Hine’s photograph convincingly affirms the dignity of the industrial worker. In Payne’s photograph, the staging feels more literal, its meaning activated largely by the wall caption rather than convincingly demonstrated within the image itself.

In contrast to the prevailing stillness of many images here, Payne’s photograph of the New York Times printing plant in Queens is all about motion. Layers of roll paper stream past the lens, the blur suggesting speed and volume. The wall label notes that he arranged to photograph the press during a run of high-color pages, heightening the vividness of the scene. The image is technically assured, capturing both the flow of paper and the printed detail.

Elsewhere, Payne finds unexpected transformations: trumpet bells awaiting shaping resemble a bouquet of copper lilies; an Oscar statuette suspended upside down in a plating bath becomes ambiguous and faintly surreal. In Titleist golf balls after being painted (2019), seven golf balls supported on purpose-built racks stand in sentinel-like formation. Payne’s lighting emphasizes their dimpling and isolates them against black space, elevating these mundane objects into totems.

Payne’s project documents contemporary American manufacturing with highly evolved technical skill and clarity. If industrial photography once taught us to admire the power and promise of industry, Payne’s photographs reaffirm that way of seeing. They present factories as sites of production, precision, and power, continuing a tradition in which photography celebrates the act of making even as the reality of industrial activity in America shows us a very different picture.