Pirelli Work

“I wanted to show the manufacturing process as clearly as I could and to do so in this factory meant it would have to be lit. Ironically, my stubborness in trying to avoid lighting would now have its own unexpected rewards. Because of the desperate amount of time that I had spent there, I knew in a visual way the processes of the factory; the rhythms and cycles of the machines, the movement and steps that the operators had to take, the movement that the processes predetermined for them. I began again, rephotographing the factory using lights, sometimes three or four lights triggered by remote control devices. The main light, the one balanced to light the subject, was often held on a pole by my friend, away from the camera, mimicking the fashion techniques that I knew from my past. I now understood and knew what I wanted to do. The workplace had become, in a real sense for me, a theatre and I embraced the look of these new photographs with their relation to fashion, film noir, and even Soviet realism. For me this ‘look’ seemed a more telling way to record and document this enforced ritual.” Chris Killip

Clive Dilnot is currently on the faculty of New School University, New York, which he joined in 2002 as Senior Associate Dean in Academic Affairs at Parsons School of Design. Previously, he was Professor of Design Studies and Director of Design Initiatives at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has also taught in Britain; at Harvard University, in the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts and the Graduate School of Design; and in Hong Kong, where he was Director of Graduate Studies in Design. He has been a visiting Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, the University of Illinois in Chicago and Rhode Island School of Design. He has lectured, given keynote addresses and acted as visiting critic at universities and conferences world-wide.