DISTANCE LENDS ENCHANTMENT

摘要

Faced with David Maisel's photographs of huge gold or copper mines in the American West, it might seem perverse to think of 18th-century Shropshire, but that's where their story begins. Not just because that county is usually seen as 'the cradle of the Industrial Revolution', but because pictures of its key sites were quickly in demand. For artists like Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, the ironworks at Coalbrookdale were a profitable source of imagery - a typical painting of his in London's Science Museum shows them silhouetted at night against a backdrop of flames. It was clear that Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) didn't just apply to natural phenomena - there was also an industrial or technological sublime.