»Dead Tech, Or, On Decaying Machinery

I recently found an edition of "Dead Tech" reprinted by the excellent Santa Monica booksellers Hennessey and Ingalls. This book presents a series of photoessays on decrepit, abandoned, obsolete, rusting infrastructure around the world: quietly rotting piers in Manhattan, factories in Germany, the quietly beautifulTucscon Boneyard. The latter collection of old United States Air Force craft resides at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, and the pieces slowly parted out to other planes, or sold for scrap. The precious-metal content of a single old Pratt & Whitney spark plug is in the hundreds of dollars, for the gold and platinum within; meanwhile, the shells and fuselages of the airplanes sit in the desert sun.

The Dead Machinery community on LiveJournal has an excellent photo pool of everything from rusting Soviet tractors to the insides of old steel mills. Photographer Mark Perrott published an excellent photoessay, Eliza: Remembering a Pittsburgh Steel Mill, on the Jones & Laughlin blast furnace. A series of photographs on flickr show the remnants of jets in Arizona and in California.