See Amazing Images That Reveal The Strange, Otherworldly Beauty Hidden In American Factories
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, Emily Barske Wood
Photo: Peeps Marshmallow Chicks cooling on a conveyor belt before packaging at Just Born Quality Confections (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania), 2023 Christopher Payne/Courtesy of the artist, © Christopher Payne/Esto
A collection of photos published by the New York Times Magazine in 2014 prompted Susan Brown to make a cold call. It wasn’t usually her style, but the pictures delighted her, and she felt compelled to get in touch with the photographer.
The photo essay showed intricate details from New England textile mills: hundreds of yarn bobbins at a carpet company, a worker removing defects from a floral fabric, a close-up of a sewing machine’s gears. The photographer was Christopher Payne, and he was New York-based. The images were part of his early forays into photographing American manufacturing. Brown praised his photos and asked how he’d executed some of the shots; she hoped to someday find the right opportunity to feature his work at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where she was, and still is, a curator. Payne was happy to connect, knowing museum curators are particularly choosy in selecting high-caliber art.
The occasion to collaborate has come more than a decade later. “Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne” will be exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum from December 12, 2025, through fall 2026. The display will feature more than 70 of Payne’s photos, including some never-before-seen work captured for the museum project.
Trained as an architect, Payne taught himself to take photos using design principles, drawing on his ability to visualize three-dimensional spaces on two-dimensional surfaces. He thought of photos like compositions—he created a stage that he fit the action onto.
“I think the advantage that [architecture] gives me, and also the burden, is that I tend to seek out geometric compositions in my work,” Payne says.
The photo projects he pursued often reflected his love for architecture, design and assembly. While working on his 2009 book, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, he photographed abandoned mental hospitals across the country, which seemed to have grand exteriors, but dilapidated interiors.
“They were these cities within the cities,” Payne says. “I always liked photographing the farms, the workshops and the infrastructure that kept these massive, sprawling campuses going. Every hospital had that manufacturing component.”
Not long after Payne finished the asylum project, his mother suggested he check out an old yarn mill in Maine. His visit there felt like walking into a museum, and when he spoke with the mill owner, he learned of other companies in the Northeast that were remnants of the factories that powered the American Industrial Revolution. The mill project became the photo essay published by the New York Times Magazine.
Soon Payne’s curiosity expanded beyond the old mills in his corner of the country, and his expertise grew into capturing interesting manufacturing operations around the U.S. Companies and publications commissioned his work. He published a collection of photos from a Steinway piano factory in New York, photographed the production of Peeps marshmallow treats in Pennsylvania and learned how roller skates were made in Minnesota. He captured the technicolor factory where Jelly Belly jelly beans were made in California, observed the race to produce coronavirus vaccine vials in New York and witnessed the laying of high voltage cable used for fiber optics in South Carolina.
Christopher Payne first toured the Astoria, New York-based Steinway factory in 2002 as an architect.
Both his father and grandmother played the piano, and after they died, he made it a goal to return to the factory for a photo project, seeking to show the beauty of the artistry and materials that go into making the iconic pianos.
Payne liked the creative challenge of finding beauty and order in places that were traditionally unphotogenic or cluttered, and he took pride in creating photos that showed industrial production in unexpected ways. He sought to photograph mass-produced goods, like American flags, as well as modern products, like computer chips.
Kathy Ryan, former director of photography at the New York Times Magazine, recalls that Payne’s project featuring one of the last pencil factories in the country “was one of the most reacted to, beloved photo essays” the magazine ever published. His photos transformed the pencils into monumental sculptures, she says.
“He’ll make a picture of something tiny, like a batch of pencils, and it looms large in his photo, and it looks like this big, gigantic, building-like edifice—and it’s pencils,” Ryan says. “But then he can also go in and photograph the largest jet engine you can imagine in an airplane manufacturing plant, and then that gets rendered in a smaller way.”
The strength of his eye for patterns and abstract art on a busy factory floor is perhaps matched only by his desire to get the perfect shot no matter how much time it takes.
Ryan tagged along with Payne as he took photos at the facility where specialists perform maintenance on New York City subway cars. He had a strong idea of the shot he wanted because he’d already watched their operations several times. And his obsession seemed to impress the workers, who stalled their progress to move the hoisted-up cars a few inches over at Payne’s request so he could get the best angle.
Most of his photo assignments take months to plan, and hours or days to capture. He jumps hurdles with the companies, learning what can’t be photographed due to safety protocols and for proprietary reasons. Some businesses momentarily stop production for him.
Payne observes factory workers and machines for long periods of time, finding people suitable for the photos he envisions: someone tall enough to fit well into the frame of equipment, or a friendly worker who is willing to cooperate as he repeatedly adjusts his lights or asks them to shift the placement of their hands.
“Structurally, clearly his training as an architect informs his work,” Ryan says. “Spiritually, his love and respect for the industrial worker and the craftsmanship of what they do also defines his work.”
In factory workers, Payne saw a microcosm of the U.S.—young and old, immigrant and American-born, people with soiled aprons and those with clean white suits—all working together side by side. “It seems like it’s one of the few places in this country where democracy still works, because everyone has to work together toward a common goal,” Payne says. “If people aren’t working together in a factory, then it doesn’t work.”
Factory visits around the country broadened Payne’s understanding of the challenges facing American manufacturing. Many assert that global competition has hampered a resurgence in U.S. manufacturing, he says, but he also heard from factory leaders that it’s difficult for them to find enough skilled workers because the country has not prioritized vocational education.
Payne pursued his photo book Made in America, published in 2023, to share the highlights of his industrial photos. Curator Susan Brown reached out to him in January 2024 to explore an exhibition at Cooper Hewitt. The museum has never displayed a large-scale photography show. But Brown felt Payne’s photos were the right project to represent the entire country as the Smithsonian commemorates the United States turning 250 in 2026.
“It’s a very American project,” Payne says. “I love this country, and to me, this is sort of what I’m trying to do to be a good American, is to try to show people how important manufacturing is and to honor craft and manual labor. … The places that I photograph exist in the public discourse, but few of us know what factories actually look like.”
Payne’s images could also educate Cooper Hewitt visitors about manufacturing, a key part of the design process seldom explored at the museum, Brown notes.
“We collect prototypes and we collect sketches and concept drawings and unfinished products, but in between the prototype or the concept drawing and the finished product, there’s a really big step that we usually don’t get to share,” Brown says.
That’s what makes Payne’s work particularly compelling. He uncovers how the creation of useful objects, from pencils to wind turbines to electric vehicles, can be beautifully photographed. He shows us the art of the in-between.
About the Author
Emily Barske Wood is an Iowa-based journalist. She works part-time as the special projects editor for the Des Moines Business Record, and her work has been published by the Guardian, the Poynter Institute, and NPR’s Public Editor team. She recently completed a Master of Fine Arts in narrative nonfiction through the University of Georgia and is working on a book project that will be published by the University of Nebraska Press about a tornado that hit her hometown. You can follow her work on Instagram @emilybarskewood.