This is the first of a new series of photographic posts that I’ll be doing based on my reading of David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old. In it, he describes the disorientation that people experience when their sense of “technological time” is thrown off by the juxtaposition of what they think of as old and new technologies.

His point is that “old” technologies co-exist quite easily with that ever-advancing future we call the present.

“We see technologies such as the camel, the donkey cart, the wooden plough, or the hand-loom as technologies of previous eras,” he writes. “Yet they, just like the aeroplane and the motor car, were made, maintained and used throughout the last century; they existed in the same, interconnected world.”

The name is a play on the Louis Mumford coined term, “technics.”