Architecture built to be feared is rarely built to be seen. For three years Michael Collins photographed the interiors of historic and live British nuclear stations, and his resulting book locates the sublime in structures often encountered only as distant silhouettes or public-relations renderings. Granted unprecedented access to Dounreay, Sellafield, Chapelcross, Winfrith, Dungeness, Trawsfynydd, Sizewell A and B, Wylfa, and Torness, he has assembled a body of work that spans seven decades of an industry’s ambition and decay, made visible as it seldom is.
The large-format equipment gives the project its double character. Reactor halls and their austere, chapel-like surroundings fill the plate with immense, quiet volume; the same photographs carry close witness to control rooms, instrumentation, rusting panels with wonky labels, peeling paint, and miles of tangled wiring. Collins lets a disarmingly childlike palette of pipes and valves counterpoint abstract patterns and eroded textures. Neither conventional architecture record nor simple industrial reportage, the imagery moves between monument and material, between the vaulted scale of scientific endeavour and the dusty, worn substance that sustains it.
Photographing the core of a live reactor, waste storage, decommissioning in progress, and the interiors of experimental tokamaks, Collins registers a very British landscape of deferred endings. The sublime here is not scenic but structural, shaped by years of maintenance, contamination, and uncertainty. Because many of these plants are neither fully operative nor straightforwardly demolished, they remain in a condition photographers can enter only by permission, one in which their surfaces have become sediment of history.
Published in 2024 by RRB PhotoBooks as a 174-page hardcover Special Edition, the book is the sixth from a photographer whose exhibition history reaches from the British Museum and Barbican to galleries abroad. For the serious collector, its distinction lies not in any scarcity of print, but in the privilege it records: an unhurried, formal examination of places that remain almost always out of frame.
