Photographing the Printing Press

In a new series of massive portraits of newspaper presses at rest, photographer Brian Howell considers the state of modern labour and the fast fading twilight of a troubled industry

                                                                                  Photo: Brian Howell

 When the photographer Brian Howell arrived at Surrey’s Kennedy Heights Printing Plant, this roller coaster of conveyors was roaring and pumping out thousands of copies of the Vancouver Sun. He could have photographed that industrial blur. But instead Howell waited for the machine to go still, waited for the workers to go home. Alone in that fluorescent-flooded cavern, he then captured this telling masterpiece, which hangs-seven-and-a-half feet wide and five feet tall-along with sixteen other shots of presses from around the continent, at the Winsor Gallery this month.Timeliness is something contemporary artists often abhor, as it smacks of brutish journalism, but Howell has worked for 20 years as a photojournalist and has no qualms about letting lived experience touch on his art. And the sincerity of his inspiration gives his work the kind of simple eloquence that you only get when an artist homes in on a genuine historical moment. This is the fast-fading twilight of the golden age of newspapers. (In a recent issue of Superman, Clark Kent even quit his job at the Daily Planet, amidst a tirade about the state of journalism.)Howell’s work calls up the Depression-era photography of Walker Evans-those black-and-white portraits of steel-eyed Americans living through untenable circumstances beyond their control. The obvious caveat, of course, is that Howell’s photographs are entirely unpeopled. The dozens of workers might have been Raptured out of the plant a moment before the shot was taken. Left behind: the steel and rubber giants of an industry on the brink. Where in an Evans work the viewer is drawn into the staring eyes of a hardened soul, in these Howell photos the eye floats through the yawning interior of an industry’s guts. An Evans photo gets at macroeconomic woes by playing off the viewer’s sympathy for a solitary subject; a Howell photo gets at a similarly enormous problem by the very absence of people, the ghostly absence of a vanished tribe.”I guess I could have taken images of giant newsrooms or people shoving microphones around,” says Howell, flipping through photographs on his iPad at the Art Gallery Café. “But I was more interested in the mechanism, the delivery system.” While he’s unabashed about his love for print and his wariness regarding the internet’s dismantling of traditional journalism, Howell isn’t actually anti-tech or moralistic, himself. Technology is neither good nor evil. Nor is it neutral. “I wanted to create something that simply considers journalism,” he says. “I question how technology affects the manner in which we recieve information. There is too much information from unreliable sources, and I do think there’s been a compromise. Did you know there are now three public-relations employees for every one journalist in America? What do you think that does?” Brian Howell’s “Newspaper Conveyor System” depicts the Kennedy Heights Printing Plant in Surrey, where theVancouver Sun and Province newspapers can print 22 copies of a 96-page paper a second. Other spaces featured in Howell’s show include the plant that produced the Chicago Sun-Times (now dismantled) and the plant responsible for the Edmonton Journal (which will soon be dismantled, too). Howell’s PRESS exhibition runs from Feb. 28 – Apr. 6 at the Winsor Gallery