See How The Telecom Industry Is Quietly Changing The Shape Of Our Cities

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Once the photographer Rian Dundon began seeking out cell-phone towers and transmission boxes, he started seeing them everywhere. Dundon’s resulting series of photographs, taken around the Bay Area, are scant on people, but instead highlight the telecommunications infrastructure–from tall, tree-like towers to clusters of boxes and cables–that have slowly taken over our cities and landscapes. The infrastructure, Dundon says, serves as a way to think about ideas and concepts that are largely invisible, namely, our creeping dependence on constant communication and data usage. “The growth of these inorganic sculptural outcroppings on the urbanscape are a symptom of the failure to keep that process of dependence in check,” Dundon says. “Technology has such a place in our lives now that it’s hard to take a step back and look at what it really is and how it reaches us.”

The galvanizing event for Dundon’s work on this project was the introduction of California Senate Bill 649 in 2017, which largely would have deregulated the process by which wireless service providers install telecoms infrastructure in cities.


See How The Telecom Industry Is Quietly Changing The Shape Of Our Cities