This week Lenscratch is looking at some of the top 50 portfolios from Critical Mass….

Stephen Mallon straddles the photographic world working as an industrial photographer, yet creating images that cross over into fine art photojournalism. His work gives us a front row seat to the contemporary industrial age and the unsettling results of living with machines. His winning portfolio, Next Stop Atlantic, is especially fascinating to New Yorkers, who will see their subway cars in a whole new light. I am also including selected images for Stephen’s amazing work of the US Airways flight that landed on the water, Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549.

Most people look at work sites and machinery and see nothing more than concrete and steel. Stephen Mallon looks at them and sees both a surreal beauty and the wonder of their engineering. He is an industrial photographer not just by profession but also by nature. Even as a teenager in North Carolina, long before he formally studied photography, Mallon would go to airports, rail yards, and construction sites and take pictures. In the years since, he has traveled everywhere from Africa to New Jersey, searching out artificial landscapes and industrial footprints. His work has been exhibited widely, and he has been commissioned by a wide range of commercial clients, including Publicis, Sudler & Hennessey, AECOM, and AARP.

NEXT STOP ATLANTIC: Can you imagine if you were on the last drop? You get on the train expecting to get out at Atlantic Station and end up hitting the Atlantic Ocean instead. Seeing these massive mechanisms being tossed into the ocean like a toy in the bathtub is a ping in my heart. I have always been attached to these machines, their surreal beauty integrated into their functional engineering At first I was stunned the moments of violent recycling, watching the water quickly adapt to its new underwater houses.

Images from Next Stop Atlantic, copyright Stephen Mallon

After being pushed and stacked like a sardine in these subways cars over the past decade, it is nice to see the sardine actually getting one of these as its new steel condo. These unbelievable photographs were captured over the past three years from Delaware to South Carolina. Since the 1600’s man has artificially created reefs. The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s recycling program has been involved for the past decade, retiring over 2500 subways cars to the ocean to help rebuild underwater reefs along the eastern seabed. These are my images, seconds before these mass transit vessels join history in building homes for life under the sea.

Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549, a series of photographs documenting the salvaging of the US Air flight that, amazingly, airline captain Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger had managed to safely emergency-land in the Hudson River on January 15, 2009. The images Mallon produced during the two-week effort by maritime contractor Weeks Marine have since been exhibited in New York and featured at numerous websites, in print, and on TV, including Wired.com, New York magazine, NBC, Resource Magazine, Vanity Fair, and CBS News.

Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549, photographs copyright Stephen Mallon.