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THE ARTIST

Stephen Mallon

Beacon, NY

Stephen Mallon is a photographer and filmmaker who specialises in the industrial-scale creations of mankind at unusual moments of their life cycles. Mallon’s work blurs the line between documentary and fine art, revealing the industrial landscape to be unnatural, desolate and functional yet simultaneously also human, surprising and inspiring. It has been featured in publications and by broadcasters including The New York Times, National Geographic, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, MSNBC, The Atlantic, GQ, CBS, the London Times and Vanity Fair. Mallon has exhibited in cities including Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, St. Louis and New York, as well as in England, Italy and the Czech Republic.


In 2009, Mallon produced Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549, a series of photographs recorded the salvaging of the passenger aircraft which captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed on the Hudson River. In 2010, his solo exhibition Next Stop Atlantic documented the disposal of New York subway trains at sea to form artificial coral reefs. He was commissioned by the New York Times Magazine to shoot the film Behind The Curtain, a time lapse movie documenting two days behind the scenes of the Metropolitan Opera in 2013.

His short film about the transportation and installation of the new Willis Avenue Bridge was created from over 30,000 still images. The film, “A Bridge Delivered,” was reviewed by the Wall St Journal, New York Magazine, GQ, PDN, andWIRED. It was then screened in five festivals in New York, Los Angeles and Bristol, England. Stephen’s project following the MTA’a artificial reef project where over 2000 subway cars were placed in the Atlantic was shown at The New York Transit Museum’s Grand Central Terminal Gallery. Over 60,000 people experienced the exhibition and was featured by Gothamist, Artnet, Yahoo, Fox News, and numerous other outlets.

As David Schonauer wrote in Pro Photo Daily, “Mallon’s word harkens back to the heroic industrial landscapes of Margaret Bourke-White and Charles Sheeler, who glorified American steel and found art in its industrial muscle and smoke during the Great Depression.”

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THE ART

Passing Freight, 2018

Photography

Passing Freight is a visual celebration of the unique beauty and function of freight train cars in the United States. In 2018 there were 1,637,000 freight cars in operation across North America, each distinctive in their construction, markings and utility. Time and human contact add to each train car’s individuality: all carrying a vast, and sometimes surprising array of goods and resources. This series of photographs captures the still active rail lines that carry freight to destinations across the country. Mallon’s industrial landscape photographs isolate freight cars within this iconic transportation system, which has played a critical role in supply infrastructure across the continent for hundreds of years.

Like the electrical synapses firing in the human brain, unseen and invisible, but essential to our ability to function, 140,000 miles of train tracks traverse America. Countless loads of steel, grain, coal and everything in between travel supported by this ancient network of distribution. Mallon has been finding locations from New York to California, patiently waiting for the combination of light, subject and environment to capture unique images where they intersect. He has chosen the “decisive moment” to capture these speeding boxcars photographically. There is an
intersection of mechanical and natural worlds, singular encounters where the trains activate the landscape, which for Mallon are fleeting and hard to predict. Patience leads to the essential moment when these elements come into position: the points in time where the colors and shapes of each railcar, all of the nuances of the light reflecting from the loads of steel, wood, and everything else are composed and captured.

Location 9

This artwork can be found at the Plattekill Service Area in Wallkill, NY

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