Cooling towers are stupidly large, some towering more than 800 feet tall. And according to Reginald Van de Velde, who has spent quite a lot of time inside them, they look bigger from within. "You feel really little in them," he says.
The structures have to be enormous to do their job. Thermoelectric power plants use coal, gas or nuclear energy to heat water and create steam. Once that steam drives the turbines that generate power, it's pumped to the top of the tower. Billions of droplets rain down to the bottom, chilling out along the way.
Van de Velde lives in Belgium, which has in recent years shuttered its coal-fired power plants. His fascination with photographing desolate buildings started in childhood, so when he heard about an abandoned plant in Charleroi in 2009, he and some friends checked it out. They climbed the staircase to the cooling tower, found the service hatch open, and stepped into a mesmerizing world. “It really resembled a scene from a sci-fi movie," he says.
The visit began an infatuation with cooling towers. Van de Velde's photographed more than 30 throughout Europe. When he isn't designing ad campaigns at work in Sint-Martens-Latem, he scours satellite maps for the round, tell-tale forms. If no one is there when Van de Velde arrives, he simply sneaks in. "Ninety-five percent of the time, it’s just crawling under a fence,” he says.
Once inside, Van de Velde shoots with a Nikon D800, wide angle lens, and a tripod. He makes long exposures a few seconds long to compensate for the low lighting. Sometimes the towers are still in use, so he has to wear ear plugs to protect against the water's deafening roar. Others are ghostly and quiet, which is what he prefers. "You enter a place that’s more or less sealed off from the outside world," Van de Velde says. "The only sound you hear is from birds who occasionally venture inside." That, and the click of a shutter echoing through an impossibly large space.
