TITLE: Water Towers

In my work of documenting the rich industrial heritage of Europe, I have been often fascinated with the beauty of historic water towers. Their unique forms, functional elegance, and enduring presence make them powerful symbols of a bygone industrial age. Inspired by the typological studies of Bernd and Hilla Becher, I approach these structures with a similar intent—to record, preserve, and elevate them through the clarity of black-and-white photography. This series is both a tribute to their visual legacy, and an attempt to evolve and continue the dialogue between form, function, and memory in the industrial landscape.

AUTHOR: German Simonson (Lithuania)

I started my industrial photographic journey in 2019, creating photos of local industry in Lithuania, the country where I live. The name “Industrial Fine Art“ is intentionally aspirational and provocative at the same time, and it defines the goal: to create beautiful photos of often ugly or, at best, utilitarian buildings and objects. The genre can be described as a mix of architectural, landscape, and urban exploration photography.
There are many types of subjects I am interested in — heavy industry like blast furnaces, steel mills, coking plants, cement plants, power plants, headframes, and winding towers — but also grain elevators, train yards, water towers, various silos, and factories in general.
Why exactly I became interested in this genre is unclear, but one theory points to the influence of post-apocalyptic computer game aesthetics, such as Fallout, which often uses industrial landscapes as a backdrop. The choice of industrial buildings as photographic subjects may seem strange to many, but I am continuing and evolving the work of famous artists of the past and present — Charles Sheeler, A. Aubrey Bodine, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Michael Kenna, David Plowden, W. Eugene Smith, and Trent Parke, to name just a few — who have created many excellent photos of industrial subjects.