by Christopher Payne and Simon Winchester
240 pages, hardcover, $85
Published by Abrams Books
abramsbooks.com

A high-speed sanding belt sharpening a rotating row of pencils. The world’s largest metal 3-D printer creating the first rocket with this technology. The images in Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne show rare views inside our nation’s factories. For the book’s 76 full-color photos of things being made—from roller skates to surgical robots—Payne says in his afterword: “I search for moments that are unique to that place or process: perhaps a special machine or a beautiful detail that is representative of the whole.” The large-format, 240-page book also includes essays by Kathy Ryan, The New York Times Magazine’s director of photography, and best-selling author Simon Winchester.

Raw wool in blues and greens pile up on the 113-year-old basement floor of a textile mill running since 1820. Rectangles play in the more-than-100 fluorescent lights, silver metal-paneled walls and scaffolding that surround the hull section of a submarine ready to be prepped for painting. A couple of blue-gloved hands sticking out of white sleeves are all we see of two people holding a length of white ribbon ceramic against a black field. In some of Payne’s photos, intentionally darkened backgrounds dramatize the scenes, drawing us right in. In others, visual complexity, repetition, symmetry and color render them almost abstract, inviting our reverie.

The book’s final photo of American flags being mass screen-printed and its hardcover image of massive embroidery machines stitching hundreds of star-studded unions symbolize that US manufacturing is only on the rise. —Claire Sykes