Ports francs

Anouk Meijer photographs the ports between Antwerp and Shenzhen. Cranes, containers, quays: she looks at logistics as an architecture and finds in its alignments a formal beauty no one composed. The primary colours of stacked boxes, the geometry of the gantries, the horizon cut by masts — all of it is already framed by function, and Meijer reveals it without forcing it. She hides neither the scale nor the hardness of the place; she draws an order from it. The book follows a chain: what leaves one quay arrives at another, and between the two, thousands of coordinated gestures. Meijer pulls focus on this ordinarily invisible system and restates a plain fact: what circulates connects. The objects of a continent hold, each day, by this patient mechanics. A photography of infrastructure as a form of the common.