Made in America: Christopher Payne in Conversation with Alexandra Lange

Why It Matters

Documenting America’s factories through a design lens preserves disappearing industrial heritage and informs future manufacturing, design, and policy decisions.

Key Takeaways

• Industrial photography documents America’s manufacturing heritage and evolving technology.
• Payne’s architect background shapes his compositional focus on form and scale.
• Color and familiar objects humanize sterile factory environments in his images.
• Rapid industry changes create urgency to capture disappearing production sites.
• Collaboration between architects, historians, and photographers elevates industrial documentation to art.

Summary

The museum event features Christopher Payne, an architect‑turned photographer, discussing his exhibition “Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne” with design critic Alexandra Lange. The conversation explores how photography shapes public perception of American industry and labor.

Payne’s work continues the legacy of mid‑century industrial photographers such as Alfred T. Palmer and Gordon Parks, but he updates the genre with digital tools and a focus on contemporary factories. His architectural training informs a compositional emphasis on form, repetition, and scale, turning noisy production floors into quasi‑drawings. He also uses color—bright safety gear, candy‑colored components—to inject humanity into otherwise sterile spaces.

Examples cited include a chaotic Hyundai plant in Georgia, a 2011 Steinway piano‑factory shot, an electric‑bus assembly line in California, and nostalgic images of Bethlehem steel documented by Joe Elliot. Payne recounts the logistical challenges of gaining access, the fleeting nature of many sites, and the emotional resonance of familiar objects like “Peeps” candy that appear on the line.

The dialogue underscores the urgency of preserving visual records of a manufacturing sector in rapid transition, offering designers, historians, and policymakers a richer context for sustainable production and heritage conservation. By framing factories as architectural spaces, Payne’s photographs invite a reevaluation of the built environment that extends beyond iconic skyscrapers to the unseen factories that supply everyday goods.

Original Description

In conjunction with the current exhibition Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne, please join Christopher Payne and Pulitzer Prize-winning design critic and author Alexandra Lange for a discussion on Payne’s intricately detailed photography of America’s factories. The program will consider Payne’s photographs of industrial manufacturing as part of a long history of image-making of American architecture and design, highlighting spaces of production, the skilled workers who make things, and the products themselves. They will also discuss the significance of Payne’s work now, in this period of rapid industrial transformation.

Speakers

Alexandra Lange is a journalist, design critic, and author. Her essays, reviews and profiles have appeared in numerous design publications as well as in The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. She is a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab. In 2025 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for a series there on how urban design and architecture affect children and families. Her latest book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, was published by Bloomsbury USA in 2022. She is currently at work on a book about the 1970s and DIY culture.

Christopher Payne studied architecture at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an architect for twelve years before committing full-time to photography. He is fascinated by design, assembly, and the built form. Over the past decade, through personal projects and editorial commissions, he has been on a photographic journey to learn more about what’s made here: the traditional industries that “built this country” as well as the newest and most technologically advanced processes. These images can be found in his latest book, Made In America. Payne’s work frequently appears in The New York Times Magazine and Popular Science, and in other major publications including Interview, National Geographic, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Time, and Wired, among many others.

MADE IN AMERICA: THE INDUSTRIAL PHOTOGRAPHY OF CHRISTOPHER PAYNE ON VIEW through sept. 27, 2026