Today, I offer two fascinating images by Christopher Payne, prolific photographer of the inner mechanics of American industry. Payne marvels at the things we’ve made, and his great skill is in bringing others into that same perspective, into places whose existence we may never have even considered. He leads us through a hall of pianos at the Steinway factory, and a maze of computer data inside Bloomberg’s Equinix data center. These hidden rooms reveal the physical scaffolding that supports intangible creation. I am riveted by what materializes in the photographs of these vastly different houses of creative energy. 

Steinway & Sons, Astoria New York

Equinox Data Center — Bloomberg Markets

The first image is a tunnel, lyrical and earthy. The scale feels large enough to take a walk through its arches. It’s like we’ve fallen into the pages of Dr Seuss and are now inside one of his melodious landscapes. Or perhaps, the scene is somewhere more reverent, like the corridor of a monastery. In either case, the photograph is humming with music about to be born. It’s a photograph of potential, of creation and then future creation. All the piano rims in the room are compressed into one visual plane. That they will become, are becoming Steinways, adds to the feeling that the best of human endeavors are gestating here. They will be dispersed, their newborn keys floating songs into room after room.


There is no easy way to walk through the second image, unless one could shrink down to the size of a cable. It’s not a place where humans seem to belong. (One senses that an errant foot could wreak havoc on the entire financial market, like a giant trying to tiptoe through a village.) But it’s a human place in some other way. The tubes and steel were forged by men and assembled here with ambition, in such surprising color. Payne’s photograph maps a city of information, with highways and high speed trains and parking-lots of data. The composition is built to convey speed; the eye darts around the space in the same way that I imagine the messages of finance travel.


One of these technologies was formed by centuries of accrued knowledge, as craftsmen became intimate with the properties of wood and its effects on tone. The other technology is no less remarkable, but is so very new. The data center appears as a geometric metropolis designed for swift robotic mailmen to deliver their news. It is a house of instantaneous and consequential action and decision. The other corridor leads somewhere I’d like to go, towards a beautiful form of expression, curved in the act of waiting, patiently curing there in Astoria.

-Lisa Woodward



See more of Christopher Payne’s work here