Technology

What Does the Internet Actually Look Like?

Rooms and rooms of cables, switches, and freezing cold air

By Emily Anne Epstein
Peter Garritano

It’s difficult to define “the cloud.” Even more difficult, perhaps, is photographing it. But that’s precisely what Peter Garritano set out to do with his photo essay The Internet.

Taken over the course of the past year, Garritano visited five of New York City’s most interconnected spaces, colloquially called “carrier hotels.” Inside these buildings, like 60 Hudson and 111 8th Avenue, hundreds of fiber-optic cables, fans, servers, and machinery connect to form the Internet.

“The privacy and high security at these buildings has historically kept their inner-workings out of the public eye,” Garritano said, noting that a few of the locations he visited had never been photographed before. “‘The cloud’ is in fact a very physical space, expanding and evolving; full of real machines and real people,” he said.

But Garritano’s images are stark—cold colors to evoke cold spaces—and remind one just how elusive the Internet is. Even when we’re looking at it, it’s unrecognizable.

Emily Anne Epstein is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where she oversees visuals. She has worked as a photojournalist, reporter, and the managing editor of the New York Observer.