E.B. Bain

Photographs by Critter

In 2008 Critter was granted special permission to create photographs of the E.B. Bain Water Treatment Plant in Raleigh, North Carolina. The handsome art deco plant was completed in 1940 to nearly double the capacity of the city’s previous system. Paramount to Raleigh’s development, the new plant was the city’s sole supply of clean water for the next twenty-seven years. After E.B. Bain reached its capacity in the 1960s, the E.M. Johnson Water Treatment Plant was then built to more than triple Raleigh’s water supply. These two plants worked together for twenty years until the former plant was decommissioned in 1987. Vacant, vandalized, and overgrown, E.B. Bain remains one of Raleigh’s most architecturally significant buildings, and a monument to Raleigh’s post-War transition from town to city.

Critter’s slide photographs present detailed and sweeping views of E.B. Bain. Disintegration marks every surface, and nature encroaches. The images recall the Desolation phase in Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire. Though Cole depicted distinct stages of human civilization, Critter’s photographs remind us that Destruction and Desolation are contemporaneous consequences on the path toward The Consummation of Empire. Pockets of decay can always be found outside the frame of picturesque progress.

Critter is a graphic designer, photographer, writer, editor, and the executive director of Inférieur. He is also the founder of Things Change Over Time, an independent publishing company based in North Carolina.

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E.B. Bain Index

  1. E.B. Bain – 2008–2009 – 3 13
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inférieur is updated occasionally by Critter at inferieur.com/photo. Entire contents copyright 2020 by Critter.