The Mechanism

A melancholic black-and-white sequence that treats the contemporary city as evidence of a story already underway, one about surveillance, infrastructure, and the machinery threaded through daily life.

Mårten Lange made The Mechanism across multiple cities, cutting back and forth between tight architectural details and wider urban views to build what reads as a filmic, almost narrative sequence. Rather than documenting any single place, the photographs use recurring structural motifs, grids, scaffolding, surveillance apparatus, glass and steel, to trace how technological development presses on ordinary experience, landing somewhere between reportage and speculative fiction. The book was published by MACK in 2017 as a hardcover bound in Japanese paper, 96 pages of tritone plates at 22 x 28 cm.

Lange (b. 1984, Gothenburg) studied photography at the University of Gothenburg and the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham. The Mechanism followed earlier MACK and Études Books titles including Another Language and Citizen, along with self-published volumes such as Machina and Chicxulub, extending Lange's recurring interest in built and natural structure as a way of reading the present.