Behind the scenes of the people who demolish buildings for a living

As numerous Instagram posts will testify, people just love to look at buildings getting knocked down. There’s something so captivating about that huge, brutal, utter destruction and the debris it brings. Perhaps it reminds us of the fleeting transience of life itself. Perhaps we just love mess, cranes and diggers. Either way, this surely universal fascination with smashing shit up means that we’re very, very into a new project from Alina Schmuch, a photographer who has put together the book Script of Demolition.

The book isn’t just pictures of stuff being destroyed and buildings toppling down (although these are very cool), but it shows the story of a family of demolition people, who have passed the job down the generations. Alina says: “In their work, the blasting engineer uses a 
camera as a measuring apparatus to precisely study the seconds in which a house is demolished. The image production and its analysis function here like a permanent calibration between the idea and the reality to optimise the process of demolition.” The images she creates show how buildings collapse, toppling forlornly as one storey crashes into another, and she aims to investigate how the meticulous technical work of a blasting engineer impacts this big, billowing outcome.