AA-2026-81AA57
On the image
A massive agricultural processing facility sprawls across the plain under an overcast sky, its long corrugated-metal warehouses painted an institutional magenta by the infrared film stock used here. The 1950s invested heavily in the belief that consolidation and scale were solutions to every problem, including the production of food, and this structure represents the moment when farming stopped being something small operators did in their fields and became something corporations did in enormous buildings. A few vehicles cluster near the entrance like attendants, and the landscape beyond stretches flat and treeless, the kind of place chosen because the land was cheap and abundant and nobody important lived there.
The color shift — that salmon-pink casting — is the artifact of how color photography worked in the late 1950s, when infrared film was used for surveillance and agricultural documentation, revealing what the human eye could not see. Here it turns an ordinary industrial landscape into something slightly alien, which may be the only honest thing the film manages to do, because there was nothing natural about what was happening inside those buildings.
Visually related — by likeness
Industrial Agriculture Complex, Western United States, 1958. 1958. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-81AA57. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/industrial-agriculture-complex-western-united-states-1958.
@misc{aaAA202681AA57,
title = {Industrial Agriculture Complex, Western United States, 1958},
year = {1958},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-81AA57},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/industrial-agriculture-complex-western-united-states-1958}
}TY - ART TI - Industrial Agriculture Complex, Western United States, 1958 PY - 1958 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-81AA57 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/industrial-agriculture-complex-western-united-states-1958 ER -
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