Photographer Todd McLellan has cornered the market on what one might call “object autopsies.” His new book, Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living, is a beguiling study in the complexity and innate beauty that informs good design. Match that with aesthetic restraint and a bit of OCD and surely some new form of design fetish porn is at hand.
“It fascinates me that older objects were so well-built, and were most likely put together by hand,” McLellan writes in the book’s intro. “These items were repaired when broken, not discarded like our devices of today.” So, my question is, did McLellan reassemble his subjects after their close-ups or is their some mass grave of discarded parts waiting to be excavated?
At first glance, I thought the title was Things Fall Apart from the W.B. Yeats’ apocalyptic poem The Second Coming, which would make for a more portentous (and pretentious) point of reference. Though the idea of our beloved objects spontaneously dissembling at the End Times is pretty cool. Pre-order McLellan’s book before the rapture at Amazon.
Via FastCo.Design.
More typewriter porn.