Kim Steele

KIM STEELE Ohio

“Form and function has always captivated me” Kim Steele said. “Turning structure into form has been my artistic goal for almost forty years. Fascinated by industry which stresses structure, as well as architecture which focuses on form, I am ever drawn to capture their structures and convert them to shapes conveying their power and strength. I thoroughly enjoy being in these ‘spaces’ like feeling the magnitude of a dam looming over me, or the crackling of electricity everywhere about me or the roar of machinery. The locations are intoxicating. When trying to convert an inanimate object, a laser exciter, to portend it’s meaning, like fusion, I then feel alive. This has occurred with aircraft, shipping, steel, nuclear, atomic, accelerators, space and satellites. Power and muscularity also draws me to these locations; embodying an early American Dream. To photograph this new technology using film, with my ancient Hasselblad camera, was very exciting and familiar. Film and print medium parallels the materials that I have been shooting for thirty years - metal in its various forms. And with this new technology, it provides a rich contrast, since there is so much digital data in our current world. The silver in the film process echoes these same materials. Prophetically, Hasselblad just discontinued the 503 series film camera (mine). I can feel the organic quality of film versus cold digital photographs, and over the years have learned to understand its unique properties within various types of film. The same form resides in the twenty-first century that I had explored in the last century but absent the steel mills and coal trains. This century differs from the last in terms of ‘American Might’. America ruled almost every area of industry - steel, aviation, and shipbuilding even the components of social media…but now our direction, seen in these photographs, is revolutionary technology. Seen here is a machine the size of a 737 that zaps cancerous tumors; a robot that assists disabled people to walk and lead a more normal life; unmanned drones to our astro-physists, who visit C.E.R.N.to explore the origins of our universe. The Nobel Prize winner identified the Higgs Boson here, a drive to find the universe’s most fundamental elements. Ironically, these monstrous new machines are focused on very specific tasks, some very small-eradicating tumors or searching for sub-atomic particles, and some compose a network of electronics that target enemies in the field or transport trillions of tons of materials daily. The future depends on the interworking of massive machines and intricate parts –a marriage of the old and the new, which will be conveyed in my images.”