Weird, and Weirdly Fascinating: the Work of Alastair Philip Wiper

A few days ago, PetaPixel featured an article about a very strange place. The article is called "Photographer Visits Creepy Cryogenic Chamber Where 200 Bodies Are Stored" and it features the work of Alastair Philip Wiper, who visited the Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s headquarters in Arizona. The Foundation might possibly be misnamed; according to Wikipedia, Alcor freezes legally dead bodies and heads "with hopes of resurrecting and restoring them to full health if the technology to do so becomes available in the future."

Talk about your big "ifs."

Photography from the beginning has been a way of showing people places they can't get to themselves. The Victorians flocked to exhibits showing photographs of exotic faraway places they had previously only heard about in writings and from reports, or had seen in paintings. Alcor's headquarters don't quite have the romance of the Silk Road or the palaces of the Orient, but it's fascinating to wander around inside the facility behind Alastair Philip Wiper's lens all the same.

The photographer, it turns out, who is British and is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, has been to a lot of unusual places and has a lot of interesting things to show us. What follows is a brief sampling of the projects from his website. I think I should put this behind a continuation, because even the mention of the first of these projects might be NSFW (not safe for work):

A factory where lifelike sex dolls are made; an experimental nuclear fusion reactor; a condom manufacturer; the world's oldest functioning planetarium; Europe's largest cannabis farm; the Pernod absinthe distillery in France; a feature about how Adidas shoes are made; the shipyards in Korea where the largest ships in human history are built; a 1960s church; a tour of Hasselblad; the last darkroom in Denmark; and even (ahem) a vinyl record pressing plant.

A spread from an article in Wired magazine
photographed by Alastair Wiper

These are just a few of the many. Better make sure you have some time to spare before you start looking into Wiper's work. You could be there a while.

I like this photographer. he obviously has a great curiosity about the world, like a modern-day explorer driven to map all kinds of exotic and little-known corners of creation. And to think, I had never even heard of Lanzarote and Cesar Manrique before! Fascinating.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Curt Gerston: "There’s a fascinating/hilarious show on Max (HBO) called 'How To With John Wilson.' John Wilson is a documentary film maker who takes a whimsical look at life, mostly in New York City, but often expanding to elsewhere, and in Season 3, Episode 6 ('How to Track Your Package,' the final episode of the series), John Wilson does some filming at the Alcor facilities in Arizona (starting about halfway in the episode). I recognized the guy in the first photo from your link, in blue jeans next to a cryogenic chamber, from the show. It’s absolutely fascinating listening to Alcor’s 'customers' discuss their thoughts about their frozen future. The whole series is like that: John has an uncanny knack of filming humanity’s marginal and unusual characters that make you say 'how does he find these people?' A little like Diane Arbus, but with a video camera."

Carsten Bockermann: "Reminds me of Taryn Simon's book An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar."

Mike replies: I thought of her too, although Wiper's work seems less distanced or aloof, more curious and amused. Simon seems like she is making serious art with a capital S, Wiper like he is tweaking our tails with oddities and eccentricities.

Kye Wood: "At the Louvre, there is a snuffbox collection. It goes on for miles. If you have the inclination and energy, you'll see each more intricate and gilded then the last. But, at some point, you'll hit sensory overload. The sheer details of the detail just overwhelms you input circuits.

"My point? The images at https://jakobwagner.eu/portfolio/europoort are very similar in effect.

"You can most certainly have far too much of a good thing. He strikes me as having the 'eye' of Ming Thein. But unlike Ming, he also has the chops to do portraiture photography artfully."

Mike replies: For me the problem of work like this is that it is documentary but not expressive. A lot of the old documentary photographers (Dorothea Lange, August Sander) did documentary work, but the work has gobs of personality and personal expressiveness as well. But people like Edward Burtynsky or Robert Cameron, and Wagner and Wiper, are superb at documentary while at the same time being somewhat "cold" with regard to personality and expressiveness in the pictures. It's exacerbated by the "clinical/analytical" look of digital, but it would be there anyway.

Although maybe it's partially a function of time. Is Bradford Washburn, for instance, really inherently more expressive than the great climbing photographers of today? Or will their work seem to have just as much personality and expressiveness after 80 years, once it has become historical, and when their technique looks appealingly time-bound to viewers, like Washburn's does to us?

David Dyer-Bennet: "I certainly rate the chances of being resurrected from a frozen head (or even full body) as very very low. And it's expensive. But...if that amount of money is affordable, why not? (For me, the 'why not' is embodied in some novels by Larry Niven, in which somebody finds he's been resurrected by a far-future government—and built into a spaceship they want him to run. There's no really sure way of protecting your rights in the far future when it becomes possible to resurrect you.)"

Mike replies: Funny that you should mention that. I don't read science fiction, but as I was looking at the pictures of the "Foundation" (the term rings rather sinister to me, in a dystopian-novel or evil-villain-movie way), I jumped to a possible plot of a frozen human from the 2000s being resurrected three millennia from now...and being kept in a cage as a zoo exhibit...and of course not being allowed to die. Rod Serling probably already thought of that.

Comments

[Albert Smith]

It's strange to me that there are two groups of people that want to cheat the normal cycle of life by either curtailing it through some act or hoping to extend it by believing in some science fiction with an exorbitant cost.

As one that has been in one of those groups, I can't understand the other.

[David Bostedo]

Reminds me a bit of this book that I have:

https://www.amazon.com/American-Index-Hidden-Unfamiliar/dp/3865213804

[Kye Wood]

Re your comment on my comment. Cold. Yes. Or... Corporate? Maybe just commercial. Funny thing is, warm would separate his work from the other endless parade of corporate filler.

Yes. He has amazing access. But it's being squandered. Says the man who has so many photos of his dog, that his brother from another mother once commented "Mate, what's with all those photos of that brown dog?"

[Steve Rosenblum]

Can't help but envisioning Woody Allen in the opening scene of the movie "Sleeper" waking up 200 years in the future after being cryo-preserved wrapped in Birdseye TV dinner foil with his glasses still on. =)

[PDLanum]

This reminds me of a CS joke.

A programmer sacroficed himself and had his body frozen just before 2000. (At the start of the Win2K hoax). The timer for his "Jar" had a bug and it never awakened him, so he remained frozen until 9,999.
When awakened, he saw tall thin silver dressed people running around high fiving each other screaming "We are Saved".

After he sat up and had a little soup to get him going, he asked why they were all running round being so happy.

The "leader" look at him sort of puzzled and said, "This is the year 9,999 and you are the only person on the planet who understands COBOL. (Which stores year dates in a four digit field)

[Bill Tyler]

This brings back memories. I used to have lunch every Wednesday with a gang of science/engineering folks, one of whom had been involved in Alcor and has reserved a spot for his head when the time comes. The rest of us thought the chances of future resurrection were very close to nil.

[Dave_lumb]

"For me the problem of work like this is that it is documentary but not expressive."

This is not the first time I've seen you post something to this effect - as if you have a downer on documentary photography, but the first time I'm not deleting my reply.

Why is that a problem? Why does photography have to be 'expressive'? Whatever that means. What's wrong with photographs being documentary in nature in order to clearly illustrate what things look like? That can be done while still making photographs that work as pictures. Which possibly makes them even better as documents.

There's a trend for art-documentary photography that is trying to be expressive, or 'poetic', that fails to tell you anything about the subject because it's trying to work through metaphor or some such nonsense.

What you say about the passage of time is a good point. Old photographs, regardless of technical or artistic qualities become fascinating to look at because they show us things that no longer exist.

I'm probably not making myself too clear as this subject really needs a lot more thinking about, but my point really is that looking at or taking photographs which are 'inexpressive' documents is just as worthwhile as looking at or taking those which aspire to the condition of art.

I'd say it's an even more worthwhile use of photography for amateurs and hobbyists as they can record the quotidian stuff that gets overlooked, striving to do that in a way that makes their pictures a little more polished than the casual vernacular snap.

The hardest thing, though, is finding a way to preserve the resulting pictures. Hard copies of some kind, even if not your beloved 'fine prints', seems the most likely one.

Photography is an egalitarian medium. Don't make it elitist.

[Steve Rosenblum]

So, of course, my brain immediately cued up this classic clip: https://youtu.be/3soue33ebLU?si=iAW203svXjbtfiTv

[Craig Beyers]

Re: “documentary but not expressive”. I see photos almost daily from a gentleman who makes what are clearly documentary photos of things, including birds on a stick, birds standing, a Space Shuttle in a museum, and other random things. They are certainly documentary and very much inexpressive. And they’re boring. VERY boring, especially as a collection of unrelated documentary photos. I’ve not seen any in over 3+ years that have even a hint of a story or even context. They’re photos “of” things and he posts them one or two at a time on a photo club’s Facebook page. I keep hoping I’ll see a set of photos posted that relate to each other or a URL that shows me his collections of related items. So far, it’s just those one or two images several times a week. A little expression would help the individual images. I do a fair amount of documentary photography myself and it’s really hard to be both documentary and expressive in a single image, but I try. But when I assemble collections of individual documentary photos I can be expressive and create a story of those photos. Sometimes it’s the collections that are expressive, even if the individual photos aren’t. But that’s my 2 cents.