NOW at the Waterbury Library

Photographs from the continuing series, "Brass Valley Made in America," are on exhibition at the Silas Bronson Library in Waterbury, from June 3 to July 31.

An Invitation
WHEN: June 19th at 6:30 PM
WHERE: Silas Bronson Library, Waterbury (http://www.bronsonlibrary.org/)
WHAT: Emery Roth will show slides, talk about his experiences, and read poems and stories from the draft of his book on Brass Valley. For three years Mr. Roth has been following the old railroad tracks and photographing among ruins and in the last working brass mill in the Naugatuck Valley. Thanks to the existence of a unique extruder, one brass mill continues operation. It is the last descendent of American Brass with functioning mill buildings in Ansonia and Waterbury. Mr. Roth's photographs capture the men and equipment at work, the large casting furnaces, the extruder, pickling tanks, draw benches, annealers still functioning in a facility that has been making brass tube since before WW I.


Thursday, October 11, 2007

Amber Waves


The hills and valleys of Connecticut's northwest hill towns don't look like this. Descend into the valley east of Sharon and one is quickly in spaces more vast. Things rock and roll here to a different beat, more spread out. more expansive. As I walk the land, composing it in my mind, the hills often rearrange themselves more slowly, and I get fewer shots per gallon. After a long day of exploring the route 22 corridor between Amenia and the Massachusetts border, I had little to show.

The haze did not quite kill the strong sidelight of the late afternoon sun, and my eye was grabbed by the edgy texture of the foreground soy crop and its contrast with the tassels of the drying corn in the next field. I had gotten permission to shoot on this farm just south of Copake, NY, and the farmer told me his land stretched to the foot of the tall mountain that formed the valley's eastern wall. Soon he had sent me out along a farm road. It was on the way back that I came upon this fine filigree which one might imagine stretching endlessly in either direction, left or right, or mitered into a pretty picture frame. Can you tell we're getting closer to the mighty Hudson?