Landmarks of Industrial Britain

In Landmarks of Industrial Britain, Carl Zimmerman photographs his fabrications of impossible structures that represent ruins of the British Empire. Zimmerman’s work begins by constructing scale models of monumental neoclassical public buildings that, when photographed, appear to represent real architecture. Although he portrays structures that are seemingly factual at first glance, his intent is tied more to the notion of portraiture than that of fanciful, empirical or critical record.

This series imagines a school of monumental public architecture respective of the political, economic, and technological upheavals in 19th century Britain – a country that at the time ruled about a quarter of the earth’s land mass and that Marx felt would be the home of the first workers’ state.