Exploring Active & Decommissioned Industrial Sites

Edge of Humanity Magazine

3 weeks ago

Photographer Giovanni Maria Sacco is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of these images. From the series ‘Industrial Photography’. To see Giovanni’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Industrial photography plays an important role in my work. I am generally more interested in decommissioned plants as a metaphor of the impermanence of human endeavors and, in short, of death. However, I find active plants very interesting, and I am especially fascinated by mazes of shining pipes, cooling towers and fumes. In a way, they represent the complexity of life.

The photographs shown here were taken in Italy, France, Belgium and Holland, and range from dismissed nuclear plants to the BASF plant in Holland, refineries in Holland and Italy, a steel mill in France, Charleroi along the Sambre river and Volklingen Hutte.

BIOGRAPHY 

Giovanni Maria Sacco (born in Rome in 1954) was a university professor of computer science for thirty years, until he resigned to pursue his passion for photography. He has been taking photographs since the age of eight but has pursued the art with greater seriousness and skill since the 1970s.

In 2023, he published the book *Silent Theaters* with Kehrer Verlag and, in 2024, the book *Metafisica Concreta/Concrete Metaphysics* with Contrasto.

Since 2015, he has received more than 120 awards in major international competitions, including the Architecture Master Prize, the International Photo Awards (IPA), the Fine Art Photography Awards (FAPA), and the Prix de la Photographie Paris (PX3), among others. His works have been exhibited in Turin, Milan, Rome, Trieste, Venice, Glasgow, New York, Miami, Dali (China), Dubai, Tokyo, and Zurich..

He uses digital and film cameras ranging in size from 6x6 to 20x25 cm.

All images and text © Giovanni Maria Sacco