Saturday, March 2, 2013

The Old Mill No.2: An Area Like an Arena



PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  "A Day at the Mill, Pt.2":  I tried not to look too eager to get on with my shooting as I left my new friend and his clean-up task. Near where the trailer stood, the long basilica was bisected by something that felt like a transept, though it only extended in one direction. It had the lure of complexity, almost like entering into an intricate machine. 

I climbed up a half flight of metal stairs to a metal deck beneath a tangle of ducts, pipes, conduits, and wires snaking where they could to cross around the transept opening. One duct looked large enough for a person to walk upright inside. Stairs scaled the walls through the anatomy of infrastructure and architecture; catwalks disappeared into unknown interiors beyond walls, pipes, ducts and on to sundry destinations for reasons mostly forgotten. In it's last life this had been a mighty factory producing heavy machinery.

The transept extended like an arcade with windows lining both walls, and when I went to the windows I was shocked to find myself looking down two stories into an area like an arena piled with more factory equipment. The space was two bays wide and longer than I could see.  Thirty and forty ton cranes straddled both bays. Whatever once went on here was big.  Now it looked like a tag sale of decommissioned manufacturing might.



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