In 2020, Hermes Kondor presented an exhibition of his physical world photography focused – pun intentional – on the Tejo Power Station (and now museum) in Lisbon. It was a captivating collection of photographs, richly demonstrating Hermes’ skill as a photographer and in the manner in which it tweaked curiosity about this outstanding Portuguese landmark. It’s also one I covered in The beauty of steam machines in Second Life.
While I am admittedly getting to it a little on the later side – the exhibition having opened on July 7th, 2023 – Hermes is now back with a further collection celebrating another or Lisbon’s historical industrial landmarks, and which again offers an opportunity to both admire his photographic eye and to learn about an important physical-world landmark.
Mechanical Whispers, hosted by Mareea Farrasco via her IMAGO Suburbs Galleries, presents a series of monochrome images of Lisbon’s Museu da Água (Water Museum), formerly the Barbadinhos Steam Pumping Station, responsible for pumping fresh water to the city delivered to the artificial Barbadinhos reservoir by the Aqueduto das Águas Livres (“Aqueduct of the Free Waters”), itself one of the most remarkable examples of 18th-and 19th-century Portuguese engineering.
From the 1880s through until 1928, the steam engines of the pumping station pushed water to more households across Lisbon that had been able to be reached prior to it entering service. Given its historical significance, safter its working life ended, the station eventually became a museum, retaining the great pumps and engines used to drive water from the reservoir to the city proper.
Such was the historical importance of the museum’s role in the conservation and dissemination of European cultural heritage, in 1990 it was the recipient of the prestigious Council of Europe’s European Museum of the Year Award, remaining (at the time of writing) the only Portuguese to be so honoured. Since then, the museum has continued to evolve, encompassing modern display areas offering insights into water and its importance to life, research, science, and topics such as developing sustainable supplies of fresh water in the face of climate change and population growth, as well as providing event spaces for conferences, etc.
However, it is in the steam and pump rooms where the museum holds its magic, and it is these which are the subject of Hermes’ photography. Presented entirely in monochrome, Mechanical Whispers offers an entirely unique perspective of these once mighty machines by focusing not just on their bulk and hard-edged engineering, with its heavy iron forms of its boilers and bulky pipes with oversized nuts and bolts joining their various segments, but also on the smaller – but equally important – forms of the stations, gauges, pressure valves, pistons and pressure releases.
That they are in monochrome, the images might be seen by some as missing the richness of colour evident in the actual museum, with is rich wooden floors, widespread use of brass / copper in its smaller piping and the polished steel of pressure caps and the like. However, I’d actually disagree; the use of monochrome allows many of these pieces to use a chiaroscuro-like used of dark and light. The former, seen within the machinery itself, gives a sense of a brooding sense of presence, whilst the latter – in the form of the brickwork and natural light falling from skylights above – combines with that sense of brooding presence gives the machinery a sense of life, as if giants are asleep within the alcoves and the shadows, requiring only the slightest noise to bring them to heavy wakefulness.
Coupled with this is a marvellous use of near-macro levels of focus coupled with the use of depth of field. This again brings the small elements of the remarkable engineering present within the machinery to life, allowing us to see the beautiful simplicity of a simple spiral screw valve, together with the craftsmanship evident within something as simple as a pointer on a pressure gauge, and the elegant simplicity of making adjustments to a complex machine by simply altering the position of a piston arm.
Occupying both “hanger” buildings of Imago’s Suburbs Galleries, Mechanical Whispers is a genuinely engaging exhibition by a master photographer; one which not only presents a unique view of its subject but also for the way in which encourages the visitor to learn more about that subject and its history.
SLurl Details
- IMAGO Suburbs Galleries (Rising Phoenix, rated Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 