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.


Wednesday, February 15, 2012


Brass Valley: Made in America
photographs by Emery Roth
March 3rd to April 25th
opening reception - Saturday, March 3rd, 4-6 PM
Sharon Historical Society, Sharon, CT

When I began following the old tracks through the Naugatuck Valley, I wanted to photograph what was left of its industrial past. I was looking for rust and a glimpse of another age. I never expected to find myself in a time warp, photographing where giant hydraulics are still hissing, steel clanking, hot, glowing metal, flying through the air, where the steam still rises from old pickling vats, and men charge furnaces in buildings where the soot has had more than a hundred years to cake. I never dreamed such a place still existed. This is a show about that place.


Safe Hands


ADAM SMITH: "Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.  It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased."