Pathos and Irony:  Industrial Still-Life in Japan 12, Tokyo, Japan

After hours, the world is asleep and the machines, pale and grand, come to life in the stillness of the night. It is in these machines that the photographer Tetsugo Hyakutake finds the untouchable, almost ephemeral beauty, when the steel and copper almost glisten in the street lights. The steel beams and cranes are no longer cold, inanimate objects. Rather, their beauty is revealed to the night, but only selectively, only to that one late night passerby walking home from a night shift, tired gaze fixed to the unexpectedly bright, precise angles of the machines.

It is a stretch to say that there is any conventional beauty in the portrayed scenes. Even the most discerning of gazes would not find it hard to admit that this is not a photo that belongs on a post card. But in the eye of a willing beholder, the scene is almost therapeutically meditative. And like in many cases, a revelation that an industrial landscape can possess such haunting features brings an almost unexpected sense of calmness.

The grit, the oily rust, the messiness of the industry fades away at night. The still steel giants that carry all contemporary cities on their shoulders by day are vulnerably naked in the fragility of the night. Knowing that the photo was taken in pre-earthquake Japan, before the disaster unceremoniously disrupted and ended so many lives, only further confirms that even the mightiest of giants can fall to the unexpected. Even the industrial wasteland deserves pity, as its mundane existence hides the preciousness of life support to all things modern and comfortable to an urban dweller.

The industry as a life-supporter, not as a necessary evil, is a much more viable view when the machines that supply electricity and clean water and welcoming cold air on a hot summer day fall tumbling down like a pile of rubble and when all the comforts of the everyday are taken away. These machines are there to feed us, to bathe us, to provide us with Tupperware containers for our office lunches. The steel giants of the night stand proud in this photograph because, despite what anyone may say, they know they are beautiful in their utility and function. They are beautiful, after all.