Twin Cities

Paired red and white striped smokestacks rise from a sprawling industrial plant on the western shore of Botany Bay, trailing white plumes across a flat, haze-thickened sky. Beyond a maze of pipework and tall columns, the Sydney skyline dissolves into the murk, with one tall observation tower holding its shape above the low haze. Steam lifts from working stacks across the site.

The view looks through the Orica Botany plant on the Botany Industrial Park, on the western side of Botany Bay. Brett photographed it on 26 July 2019, on the Nikon D850 with a 70-200mm lens, and the compression of that lens is what puts plant and city into a single shallow band, so the stacks and the skyline read as though they share a plane. They do not. The Landscapes collection covers his wider travel photography across Australia and Japan rather than the abandoned-places work the Lost Collective is built on. What the frame argues, quietly, is scale: a working industrial footprint in the foreground and a city pressing up behind it, with the haze of the one sitting over the other.