David Lynch: photographer of factories and nudes

Lynch’s factories have the effect of crime scenes or film sets: you can’t tell

if action is being planned or has already taken place, but there is a sense

of foreboding. They are far more human than architectural. There are dark,

wide landscapes, billowing smoke, shattered exteriors shot from below, so

they loom like ancient creatures about to awake. There are erratic grids of

brick and glass, glinting aluminium, rotting wooden steps leading nowhere.

Inside, close-ups show traces of human activity: handwritten numbers left

behind in paint or chalk, their original indications unknown. Light cuts

into corridors: are these spaces cells? What was made here?

It is perhaps inevitable that they are intensely cinematic. Although none of

these settings has ever been in Lynch’s films — the photos are entirely

separate from that work, and not part of any location scouting — they share

an imaginary world with many of them. His first movie, Eraserhead, will

prompt memories for most of monstrous domestic settings, surreal

decapitations and morbid food. But deserted oil tanks also feature, and

stark industrial windows that throw light on lethal flying sparks of metal

work. Similarly, aspects of Victorian England in The Elephant Man, and

aspects of an imaginary planet in Dune, were inspired by Lynch’s love of

factories.

“I think it started when I was two or three,” Lynch tells me. “Visiting my

grandparents in Brooklyn, New York, travelling around seeing smokestacks

belching smoke and fire. The whole mood made a deep impression on me.”

Growing up in a small town in a Northwestern state, he saw no factories at

all. “Just mental factories,” he adds. “You know, human beings can imagine

things.”

Still, Lynch says he doesn’t imagine a story to these photographs when he

takes them. “When I go into these places I sort of get a fever and start

shaking,” he suggests, “which is bad for the photographs. But it’s just a

thrill.” I ask about the possible stories because so many of the images are

eerie. “They say the world is as you are,” he replies, in the otherworldly

tone of a surreal sage. “I think probably some people would go in and feel

some fear, maybe, because there are some dark and strange places in a

factory, but there’s a lot of light borne in.”

Though Lynch can see that the end of the industrial era may be regarded by

many as progress, he points out that “there are still factories that put out

tremendous poison, and they don’t even look good”. These older ones, he

says, “were so beautiful they built cathedrals out of factories.” For a

moment I take this at face value. Really? I ask. Real cathedrals?

“Well,” says Lynch, “They look like cathedrals to me.”

The Factory Photographs will be on show at The

Photographers’ Gallery from 17 January 2014 until 30 March 2014.

David

Lynch by Petra Gilroy Hirtz (Prestel, RRP £40) is available to order

from Telegraph Books at £36 + £1.35 pp. Call 0844 871 1514 or

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David Lynch: photographer of factories and nudes