Mattia Balsamini subverts sci-fi cliches of robotics with striking portraits of mechas and mechanical dogs

When you think of robotics, you may envision grocery delivery droids bumbling down the street, those videos of bipedal robots getting whacked with sticks or robot dogs mounted with machine guns. The reality of our current robots is still a far cry from a century’s worth of sci-fi media that imagined iron giants and human-like androids evading blade runners, but nevertheless, the public opinion on robotics spans a wide spectrum – some are scared, some are excited. What photographer Mattia Balsamini does remarkably well is capture that spectrum of feelings and reactions we have when faced with modern technology by putting ambiguity, friction and humanity first.

Mattia grew up in northeastern Italy in a family business that designed and installed air-conditioning systems, meaning he was exposed at a very young age to tools, machinery, workers and materials – what he calls “the strange beauty of functional things”. Photography came naturally through that environment, where things were constantly being made, repaired, assembled and tested. “Photography eventually became a way of looking more carefully at what I had already been seeing,” says Mattia. Over the years, Mattia found himself working in laboratories, automated factories, research institutions and places where technologies were being developed before they became part of everyday life – places like Nasa, MIT, industrial production lines and offices where military robots are coded by guys who have Doom posters above their desktops. Mattia’s attention to detail is his strong suit, and technology is only as fascinating as the visual culture that surrounds it: the people who build it, their gestures, possessions and the spaces in which they inhabit.

Mattia doesn’t have a single working method and he doesn’t want one. However, he does take research seriously – digging into where he is going, what the technology does, who is involved, what kinds of access he has as a photographer. “I tend to photograph while simultaneously trying to understand what I’m looking at,” says Mattia, who is no stranger to being as perplexed by certain technologies as we are. “The interesting difference [between shooting human subjects] is that robots occupy an unstable category. A machine is usually understood through its function. A robot, especially one designed with human or animal characteristics, introduces behaviour into that relationship. It moves, waits, reacts, sometimes even appears to hesitate.” In some photos, a robot dog will look charming and innocent, in others, a mecha will tower above its creator for the cover of Time Magazine. But in Mattia’s tender approach to a complicated subject, it is the human qualities behind photography and invention that shine the brightest.

Mattia tries not to decide in advance whether a technology should look reassuring or threatening, so as not to make the image too conclusive. Ambiguity is key, and it keeps these photographs feeling strange and beautiful, whether it’s a robot developed for disaster response or a robotic system developed for military use. “Technology is rarely morally simple,” says Mattia. Due to his childhood surrounded by technology, Mattia subverts the fetishisation of technology and moves towards something more human: the people on the visible end of an enormous chain of knowledge, labour, capital, experimentation and failure.