French industrial trade magazine L'Usine Nouvelle picked up Lost Collective for a picture-led feature in early 2016. I never quite worked out how they found the project. The feature ran with the title En images, quand la nature reprend ses droits sur l'espace industriel: in images, when nature takes back its rights over industrial space.
I don't read French, so my read on the article itself is filtered through Google Translate. The framing is what you'd expect from a publication that covers heavy industry for a French readership: an Australian photographer documenting what happens to factories, gas plants, and power stations after the work stops. They liked the pictures. That part I can be confident about.
The L'Usine Nouvelle pickup came during a stretch of unusual media attention in early 2016, when the project was still very new. It mattered that the interest came from the trade press rather than the lifestyle press. L'Usine Nouvelle has been running since 1891 and is read by people who actually work in heavy industry: the audience that recognises the equipment in the photographs.
"Through his project Lost Collective, the artist photographer Brett Patman revives Australian abandoned places: hospitals, gas factories, power plants. The project highlights how nature reclaims once the people leave. After only three months, his site already hosts several hundred pictures of twenty manufacturing sites around Sydney and New South Wales on the east coast of the country."
(translated from the original French)
Read the original at L'Usine Nouvelle (archived).
