One of the lingering images from the age of machinery — the time of our forbearers — is Charlie Chaplin discombobulated by his work on an assembly line in “Modern Times” (1936). The machine he tends is presented as a relentless taskmaster demanding he work ever and ever faster. The Little Tramp is saved only by his comic innocence: He totters about tipsily, his mind and body scrambled from the repetitive work, and holds his oversized wrench like a fool’s bladder. Many of the images of machines currently on display at the Zabriskie Gallery were photographed by Albert Renger-Patzsch shortly before “Modern Times” was filmed, but their attitude is more complex.

Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897–1966) was one of the most important German photographers of the middle decades of the 20th century. His continued importance is apparent from even a cursory look at the work at Zabriskie because it immediately brings to mind the ongoing projects of Bernd and Hilda Becher, Thomas Struth, and many other contemporary large-format photographers. Renger-Patzsch is identified with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement that developed in Germany after World War I: Its distinguishing characteristic was a sharp-focused engagement with the object before the camera. It was differentiated from the sentimental, subjective, and more pictorialist styles that preceded it.

Ten of the pictures are labeled “‘Ruhrchemie’ factory, Oberhausen-Holten, Germany” (1933–34),so I will refer to them by their number in the gallery’s image list. Like all the pictures, they are black and white. This is commercial work, done for hire, which at a minimum circumscribed Renger-Patzsch’s choice of subjects. The dates coincide with his appointment to teach photography at the Folkwangschule, and his withdrawal after only two semesters as the Nazis imposed their criteria on art schools. The most conspicuous characteristic of these pictures is a highly disciplined austerity.

Image 3 is a precursor of the Bechers’ documentary pictures of industrial tanks. The similarities are so clear they are like successive generations in a family photo album. There are two large metal cylinders several stories high that run up the left and right sides of the picture, and a superstructure of steel rectangles between them. The central portion is equipped with some staircases, pipes, valves, bits of machinery, more pipes, and surmounted by a steel chimney or flue of some sort. The lighting is not quite as flat as it would be if the Bechers had taken the picture, so the shadows on the left side of the tanks, and the highlights on the right, provide modeling and depth. But there are no people in the image and the structure completely occupies the frame, with the consequence that although the structure appears very real, its physical and social contexts are not clear.

Images 4, 5, and 6 all show rows of industrial tanks used for making something: It might be interesting to know what. Rather than being shot straight on, these were all taken at oblique angles, 4 outside, 5 and 6 inside in a factory. The most attractive shapes are those in 4, about 10 or a dozen substantial cylinders a few stories high with considerably taller stacks on top, and the stacks surmounted with a shape that resembles the lamps in Riverside Park. The cylinders and stacks stand at attention with their connecting pipes and valves and control mechanisms, at once impressive in the replication of an identical shape that diminishes in size as it recedes in the distance, but also somewhat foreboding. What is it that perks, and bubbles, and fizzes in these tanks? What comes out the faucet at the end?

It is the time and place that give these pictures an ominous cast: Otherwise they are quite beautiful in the clarity of their intention and the precision of their execution.

There are another 10 pictures all labeled “‘Schubert & Salzer’ factory, Ingolstadt, Germany” (1950s). Again this is commercial work, this time at a factory that seems to make textile machinery. There are details of various devices, and some images of entire machines, but the superb picture is 15, a photograph that harkens back to the stunning work in Renger-Patzsch’s first book, “Die Welt ist schön” (The World Is Beautiful) (1927). That was the publisher’s saccharine title: Renger-Patzsch wanted to call it simply “Die Dinge” (The Things). In it, his camera rendered items from the material world with something like transcendental objectivity, expressing both their particular “givenness”and the abstract categories they participated in.

Image 15 is a picture of the inside of a gearbox. The gear is the indispensable part of any machine, as important in the history of mankind as the wheel or the lever. The gear is what makes it possible to transfer energy, however generated — waterwheel, windmill, steam engine, internal combustion engine — from one axle to another. Gears were first developed as part of the invention and perfection of the clock — the ur-machine—and without gears nothing goes. The gear is as fitting a symbol of man’s ability to control the material world as the cross has been to express Christian spiritual aspirations.

There are 10 sprocket wheels of various sizes in image 15 arrayed in a shallow metal box, square with rounded corners. In typical Renger-Patzsch format, the gearbox fills the picture frame, and actually extends beyond its top and bottom. The lighting from above right is strong enough to give clear definition and modeling to the several parts of the device, but does not obliterate the texture of the metal surfaces. There is nothing to give a sense of scale, nothing to let us know how big or small this device is, which gives it an abstract quality. It is certainly a real gearbox, but it is also a Platonic gearbox, a device to drive the cogs of our mind. The machine in Chaplin’s “Modern Times” is by turns comic and menacing, but here it is timeless, still and hallowed.

Albert Renger-Patzsch was also a great nature photographer and there are 12 pictures at Zabriskie of plants and trees. Most of them date from after World War II. The endurance of nature and its indifference to history is as much his subject as is its beauty.

wmeyers@nysun.com

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