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, September 30, 2010

Low Tide


DAVID L. LUNT (from Hauling by Hand, by Dean Lawrence Lunt): "I started when I was 10 (1948) with just a few traps around the harbor. The first year I had a rowboat and the next year I had a little, aircooled Lawson outboard that I put on it. I started out with maybe 25 traps right around the harbor. We used to go around the shore and pick up traps that people didn't want to bother with and patch those up. We also had some traps that the bigger fishermen didn't want and had discarded. We would patch those up too. The traps were good enough to fish inside and for us to haul by hand, but they weren't good enough to haul in boats. They wouldn't hold up. We also picked up old buoys and stuff around the shore. We used rope people had discarded and couldn't haul with the winch heads anymore. That is just about what everyone started out with - everyone my age."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Corea with its shoreline of docks may be the most traditional looking of New England fishing towns, but few lobstermen care much about making it look authentic. It just is.

Low tide, a time one doesn't want to arrive at the dock with a truckload of fresh bait. Tides were most extreme when we were in Corea, high highs and low lows, and seeing the docks stranded like this makes clear how much lobstermen move by the tides. I had high rubber boots with me which I carry for wading into the mud, but I forgot to use them here. There are pictures to be made from under these docks.

Many of the docks have classic fishing shacks whose use, nature and contents, until this trip, have remained a mystery to me.