Today's Photo

Pond Bottom Churn

2012-01-25T22:42:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: We've rounded the cusp, but it's too soon to feel the days getting longer, and winter's deepest blasts are probably gathering somewhere in the future, beyond the reach of forecast. For now we oscillate between freeze and thaw, part of the constant churning engine that makes tomorrow.

It's been awhile since I've been out shooting, and I've missed some great cloudscapes, an afternoon of fog, a morning of snowfall and ice melting along the river. Today never comes back after the ice has melted, and I hope for other snow and ice.

Winterdown

2012-01-20T20:59:00.010-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It's always interesting the way people react to sunrise and sunset pictures. I'll bet all photographers take them even as many photographers belittle them. To some degree I agree with those who say, it's an easy catch to photograph such prettiness. Certainly the digital world is clogged with images of sunsets, and mine may only have added to the noise. However, that easy prettiness is a challenge that makes the problem interesting: How does one make a sunset photograph that is more than a secondhand version of an event that always has more power when beheld live? How do you make the photo lead somewhere beyond sunset?

Although sunsets may be easy prettiness, they are not really easy to shoot. Every bright sunset photo is a compromise somewhere between the brightness of the sun and the fragile beauty of the clouds. To save the clouds, we may have to turn the landscape black. On our images bright light blooms around dark corners, melting their solidity, distorting colors in ways that are not like vision. And even when there is not a speck of dust on the lens, the bright light may erupt into bouquets of ugly lens flare, or worse yet, lens flare may cast a haze over large areas of the image. The sunset photographer may go right to the edge of achievable results. Now there's a challenge!

Sometimes the light of the sun bouncing from surfaces is even too bright for our eyes. How are phenomena that we can not see to be treated in a photograph? What chiaroscuro magic can we cook up where our eyes are momentarily blinded, and what would it take to create a photographic image that answers that question as elegantly as Turner's "Mortlake Terrace"?

Often the problem becomes the reverse of what a photographer usually faces: Normally we ask how we can reduce the clutter in front of us to a few manageable forms. With sunsets we often have a beautiful, abstract array of light and color, and the need to find just that bit of the world that gives it context and opens sunset to further meaning. How can we compose an image where the context is minimally intrusive and maximally communicative?

As the poem following the second sunset notes, the photographer makes the picture; something else makes the sunset. It's cheesy for the photographer to claim the sunset's power as his own. However, the visceral power of the sun disappearing over the horizon has never been questioned. For eternity it has been a sign of our connectedness to something hugely larger than we are and about which we know relatively little. Whatever we believe, a powerful sunset can't help but speak of primal forces at work, and its imagery is essential to our understanding of our place in the universe. We are led to photograph sunsets because we are overwhelmed and moved to try to "paint" with that light; we are moved to express, to communicate ecstasy, exaltation, expansiveness.

On the other hand, I apologize for possibly sending the blood sugar levels of some sensibilities into seizure with two sunsets in close succession, whatever their merit. I take it as a challenge to do better. I certainly don't claim that I have solved any of the problems posed above, but I find them interesting and worth pursuing, and I welcome comments about both where images succeed and where they fail. In most cases sunset light is most interesting for what and how it strikes, but sometimes cloud events call us to look sunset in the face.

Did I hear someone wondering why this sunset jabber is accompanied by a cloudy snow scene?

Spring Rebounding

2012-01-19T10:14:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I pause from an ongoing thread of thought to share wonderful news that cannot wait and to congratulate our son, Emery III and Kate Crescimanno on their engagement to be married. Kate and Emery share a passion for theater, and Jane and I hope that their love and common passions will make a spring ever-rebounding, renewing their love throughout their lives.

A Sunset No. 2

2012-01-16T22:07:00.006-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Not Hymn

The clouds swim away.
The photographer asks,
Where is the axis of the clouds?
What force holds them for an instant?
Even as they swim away
The photographer makes the picture
Whatever makes the clouds
Makes us
As seed makes trees
As clouds swim away

BOOK SALE NOW until January 31 on all books (including mine) published at BLURB. Go to http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii and enter promo code RESOLUTION at checkout.

Mt. Bushnell

2012-01-15T12:16:00.004-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Looking southwest the light glared, but to the east were clouds of character ready to assume a cloudscape. If only there was a point of focus! The particular subject wouldn't matter; it was a McGuffin. However the logical place to go would be to find an east-facing hill and shoot from there. Instead, we went due east and climbed the west-facing slope looking down on Tanner Hollow and straight into the glaring sun. Photographically it was exactly the wrong way to go, but we'd never been there, and we could see a clearing, high up behind the last corn field, and perhaps a clearing even higher behind that, and the clouds above them looked beautiful, and of course, we'd never been there.

The last cornfield was plowed across a steep hillside already high above Tanner Farm. Climbing, we stumbled over cut stalks like stubble on a giant's chin, Each time I looked back the clouds glared from behind a muddy, gray mass of stuff: fields, forest, farms, and hills - until I reached the top of the cornfield and turned around again. That was when I began to see the familiar shape of Mt. Bushnell at the back of Lake Waramaug and recognized the land I somehow knew, but from a new angle, the world tipped up for me to see.

Just as when shooting a bust portrait, one wants the oval of the face in the upper two thirds of the frame, greater height was needed to give Mt. Bushnell sufficient neck.

We finished climbing the field behind the field and the field behind that; and when we got there the trees that divided the fields were a scrim, and Mt. Bushnell stood hazy and clear in the first blush of what I thought would be a lazy, hazy sunset that would burn itself out pointlessly, and that was when my companion thought of a better place to shoot if we just hurried down the hill again to our cars.

It took strong incantations to pull this image from the murky light, but this is much as it appeared through my medium long lens, which is to say it is definitely a photograph and not some other species of graphic manipulation.

A Sunset

2012-01-12T23:00:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The clouds came in waves rippling at first like sand on a pristine beach, then with the regularity of marchers crossing Connecticut or like time itself, and it reminded us of the distance they had traveled and the vastness of the byway; and just then as the sun began to set, the clouds lost discipline, broke apart, dissolving into the night sky.

Sunset Pastorale

2012-01-11T20:33:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I arrived at Sunset Ridge Farm to the same spot I had photographed from six months earlier. (See yesterday's TODAY'S.) The photographer is a light chaser; the wanderer is happy to take what comes. On a given day I may be either. When broken clouds provide a light show I can be both at once.

That was what I expected at Sunset Ridge, but the balance between cloud cover and cloud break had shifted decidedly to favor the clouds. Twice the sun strafed the hills with light, and then it seemed there would be no more, and my shooting companion suggested we become chasers. We lost each other on top of Winchell Mountain when I followed a strange dewy, yellow light and stopped on this hillside with a dream of the Catskill Mountains in front of me and the low sun painting shapes on the hillsides. If someone had said I was in Brigadoon, I would have believed them.

Back at home in my computer "dark room" I struggle to recall the eerie glow that flickered over the hills and to catch the misty haze filtering bits of the slant light from the setting sun. It was a magic almost gone by the time I could click the shutter and maybe beyond the reach of photography.

Sunset Ridge Farm and Hiddenhurst Beyond

2012-01-07T19:25:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Sunset Ridge is one of the few remaining dairy farms in the area. In fields where they are not pasturing cows they are raising corn, and a lot of corn grows here and around Hiddenhurst. Hiddenhurst itself is idle though maintained. From this spot and a few others, one can imagine the valley when farmsteads dotted the hilltops and cows and corn and crops were everywhere. From Hiddenhurst looking west beyond the rail trail where the milk runs have ceased, and the chugging is all cyclists now, you can see the ruined silos of Hanover Hill, gaunt at the edge of the valley.

I took this photo just before the summer solstice a bit over six months ago. I was here again the other day. The wind was cold and ice puddles dotted the field. What a difference a solstice makes. Otherwise, it probably looks much as it did a hundred years ago. It will not be so a hundred years hence.

Ruins of Hanover Hill Farm

2012-01-05T21:46:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When dairy was everywhere in this region, this valley could still be called a dairy center. The land supported large herds that required large barns. Most of the herds are gone and the hills are littered with husks like this. Well, not quite like this. From the road it always looked a bit more derelict than the others, almost haunted. Now, it's just a charred ruin.

I only once got this close. The man who lived in the last inhabited building on the site agreed to let me trespass, though he reserved the right to scowl about it afterward, and when I returned a second time, as was our understanding, he chased me down in his ATV before I could cross this field. He turned red like a blackberry and screamed about some lady who photographed the barns from the public road. I've rarely seen anyone so angry, and I left him on his smoking ATV and walked away to photograph up the road a bit, but he soon followed after and let me know the public road was his as well. My car was parked a short way off; I considered my tires and my paint. I left, and the bad karma kept me away for a long time.

I didn't mean to provoke him a third time. However, the barns still fascinated. Their gloom was unmatched. The black gambrel that burned was large and gothic, a full two-and-a-half stories of hay storage above the cow shed. If one knows where to look the barns are visible from a number of nearby hills, and I set out to discover them all. A few of the locations were useful, but the shots were all more distant than I wanted, though from one hill I could see small gambrel-roofed entrances with flaring skirts. I imagined the cathedral inside.

I finally got permission from the owner of the organic farm right across the street to climb his hills and photograph from his fields. Little did I know that the one with the view belonged to the abandoned farmstead, and the berry-tempered man was ever belligerent. Before I could set my tripod, I saw him two fields down and across the street on his ATV, already berrying rage and purple against the green field, this time with a friend on a second ATV.

Again, I apologized and walked away with nothing usable, though he found it difficult to believe I wasn't trying to provoke him, and it kept him screaming after me for a long, long time. After that the karma was beyond me, and I didn't go back. Then in March someone told me the barns had burned. I had to drive by to convince myself it was true. All the buildings are empty now and the traces are faint of all the lives that have echoed here. I'm told some of the finest thoroughbred Holstein cows were bred in the burned-down barns.

Here are links to my photographs of Hanover Hill Farm before it burned:

http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/04/poised-for-spring.html
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/04/hanover-hill-farm-in-decline.html
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/04/spring-storm-over-hanover-hill.html
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/04/hanover-hill-postcard.html
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2009/10/grand-cowshed.html

In the Groove

2012-01-03T15:10:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Here continents collided in doughy churning enfolding an ocean sliding through the tropics before pulling apart,

and life ever since has run in the orogenic folds.

Does it run here still, or has the terrestrial fabric been rent in digital orogeny?

BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore

The House on Hanover Hill

2011-12-29T22:55:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Waiting

Inside the puddle's stain
where the setting sun rises,
a boy climbs the branches of the tree,
and a bird can be heard
as it skips from limb to limb
at a shallow edge

inside the puddle's stain
where the winds are zephyrs,
a mother takes laundry from the line
thinks forgotten thoughts
of the parcel on the postman's wagon
where the water is deep

inside the puddle's stain
where a light behind the window glows
the woman sits still illumined
beside her folded linens
as the boy leaps and lands
in the middle of the dark stain

Inside the puddles splash

BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore

Rooted

2011-12-27T20:45:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Swan snow sparkling still settling frail transient
on the old, stone Averill homestead.

BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore

Farms that Straddle

2011-12-26T12:06:00.004-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: There are still a few places where an old road, preferably a dirt road, winds through the middle of an ancient farmstead. They are a welcome discovery, though sometimes it's hard to get a lens around them gracefully and make them into a place. It is exactly this, "placeness," that I most enjoy about them.

If my road leads through a working farm, it feels preoccupied with daily chores. I am an intruder as much as if I had crossed through the family's kitchen during meal preparation. However, photography has taught me that such places are a wonderful intersection of private and public space. They are an opportunity to meet the farmer at his labor as I seek permission to photograph on his farm. Many farmers welcome conversation and a few moments' pause, and some share stories and offer tips on the best views. Sometimes they take me on a tour to show off the new piglets or share ancient yarns and family lore.

Such places must have been more common once. Whether a road was public or private, road maintenance was once the responsibility of the landowner; it was especially hard work and totally non-productive. One didn't want too many slushy spots that needed to be restored after every spring thaw. The farmer who maintained the road wanted to make good use of it, and traffic, such as it was, was probably light.

When one passed through a farm, one might pass waiting wagons of hay, dodge ducks, chickens chucking and gabbling, and sometimes the world paused while a whole herd of slow cows headed out to pasture. Even if daily traffic was light, surely friends stopped and regulars and all weary wayfarers. Their visits seasoned the week and spread the news. As much as the front porch, these yards where farms took possession of the public road were points of interchange.

Today they are rarer than roadside tree rows and often as fragile. Such places not only battle the usual sprawl and decay that consume old farmsteads, but they are constantly harried by the automobile's need for faster, wider, straighter, and soon the port side of the roadway has forgotten the starboard for the raceway in the middle. Too often I find myself speeding by spaces where the place has vanished, catching lingering traces passing: a forlorn barn too close to the road, a house with a big, front porch facing an empty field and a ruined silo, phantom nodes along a vacant network,

This road (above) has passed through the middle of Averill Farm since 1746. The cows have turned to apples, but the farm continues with the 9th and 10th generation of Averills farming there today.

NOTE: Averill Farm is the setting and inspiration for The Magical Christmas Horse, a new children's book by Wendell Minor and Mary Higgins Clark. You can read about it here.

Solstice at Straight Farm

2011-12-21T21:12:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Straight Farm rides a gentle shoulder of arable farmland to the boggy bottom of the Great Hollow. The farm ceased operation decades ago though the barns and fields are used by neighboring Cold Stream Farm. For a long time it's been a quiet place except when hay was being cut, or the bales piled into the barn. This year the lower barn became home to a noisy household of chickens, roosters, and turkeys. They cackle and crow and cluck merrily ignorant of what the holidays mean for them.

This photo was taken on March 21, 2011. The next day it was spring. As we head into a new winter we have already had an unusual autumn blizzard that took down ancient trees and caused chaos throughout New England. However, we've had nothing since, and as the holidays approach it feels as if it ought to snow.

BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore

Top Cow

2011-12-20T10:48:00.000-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Winter View

How now,
top cow
trying to see over sunset?

Hey diddle diddle
a cow's in the middle,
they'll come and correct you.

Meanwhile
on top of your pile,
fly over the moon to tomorrow.

Quintet

2011-12-16T21:12:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: May, 2009: A calm sea, but the truth is, all hope dimmed of having a pleasant sea journey from Nova Scotia to Bar Harbor as I cased out The Cat. I had never imagined a tourist ferry would be built with no public, deck space. It was a sealed tin can moaning and rattling incessantly. We had little contact with the ocean outside. Well, after inquiring, I was directed to the very back where symmetrical doors led to about a dozen feet of deck stretched across the ferry's stern. The Cat is a ferry with room for trucks and cars and hundreds of people. Twenty would make this deck feel crowded. When I sat on the only benches provided, my view was obstructed by the rail. Build it, and they will avoid it in droves. I had nothing better to do. I sat down and observed a succession of riders step out, look around at the prospects and head inside for a movie or the slots or to sit comfortably and have some food before zoning out for the next few hours.

Occasionally people went to the rail for a moment of fresh air or explored in the hope of finding a stair to more deck space, but by the time the sun set, even most of the pausers had drifted on. We took in the last of the day. I couldn't have asked for a better alignment at the point where trajectories crossed and then went on, still strangers.

On Moonlight Bay

2011-12-15T13:49:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This was an experiment I made last winter as I resumed my photography. At the moment, I can't even remember the shoot. When I viewed it unprocessed on my computer all I saw was the round globe of the moon. I'm sure I didn't expect much when I took it, and so when reviewing shots, I dismissed it without further thought.

Why experiment if you don't look at results? Today, while going through promising material from old shoots, I decided to see what was really there in my casual experiment . To my surprise, when I lifted the shadows from an image that seemed only two flecks of something and the familiar textured orb, I found a fully composed nightscape. Of course it's a bit grainy, but the exposure was spot-on; detail was already slightly blown out in much of the moon disk. I've cropped the original slightly for balance, but I'm not certain I shouldn't have used it all.

I wish I could remember shooting this and where it was taken. Clearly, I was on the way home and saw the moonrise at a miraculously handy pond. The metadata tells me it was March 24th at 7:50:18 AM EDT. The date is right; I dated the folder I saved it in. The time, clearly, is not.

It was a Thursday evening. On that date in my area the moonrise occurred 25 minutes after midnight, and the disk of the moon was 76% illuminated. This close to the horizon it would appear elongated, so 76% looks full. If anyone can identify the house, I can probably triangulate to find my precise location on the shore and maybe remember this lost moment.

SHAMELESS ADVERTISING: Until Dec.17 Blurb will give you a 25% DISCOUNT on any two BLURB printed books (even if they are mine, but, alas, not the inexpensive e-book edition). Use the promo code REDHAT. Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore.

TODAY'S PHOTO - Underbelly No.2

2011-12-12T18:12:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: However, after the extruder has been running for awhile, the beast's belly is a bit of a greasy sauna, and when the mandrel is extended, and the die hanger (here Spike) swabs it down, the extended mandrel smokes.

REMINDERS:

PRESENTATION: Tuesday, Dec. 13, 7 PM, Noble Horizons, Salisbury, CT. Click for directions.
BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore

Underbelly No.1

2011-12-10T10:20:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Next, the die hanger (here Jose) climbs in between the ram and the container and swabs grease where the hot block has just been extruded and rubs down the mandrel. Early in the morning when the press is cool, it's not too bad in the belly of the beast.

REMINDERS:

PRESENTATION, Dec. 13, 7 PM, Noble Horizons, Salisbury, CT. Click for directions.

BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore.

Cutting Edge

2011-12-07T20:29:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Cutting Edge

The cutting die

provides the edge,

the point of transformation

beyond the mandrel

in the maleable moment

heat and pressure

making metal molten

turning block to pipe

while it leaves

the metal's

crystal
structure

intact &
compact.

The die sometimes burns grease even after the pipe has been sent on. To keep the dies from overheating, the die hanger (here Ken) exchanges the hot die with the one that has been cooling, as he sets up to process the next block.

Reminders:

Housatonic Camera Club presentation, December 13, 7 PM, Noble Horizons, Salisbury, CT.

My books on Blurb: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

The Tube Cutter

2011-12-04T20:21:00.004-05:00

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

I will be speaking at the annual holiday meeting of the Housatonic Camera Club on December 13th at Noble Horizons in Salisbury, CT (link to map). This will be a repeat of the presentation, "A Tourist at Home," that I gave at the Kent Historical Society of photographs taken among farmsteads of the Litchfield, Taconic, and Berkshire Hills.

The event is open to the public, and the presentation begins at 7 PM in the Community Room. Those who wish to attend the dinner as well as the presentation should make arrangements with Judy Becker (judybecker40@att.net) by Tuesday, Dec. 6th.

The fee for the meal is $24 ea. Cocktails at 5, dinner at 6,

•

Farm: Personal Wanderings among the Berkshire, Hudson, and Taconic Hills is a book of pictures, poetry and prose about photographing the old farms of New England. It includes many of the images that will be part of the presentation on December 13. My bookstore at Blurb: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

My most recent book, Prison - The Shape of Freedom is now available in a deluxe, 12X12 edition printed on heavy, uncoated paper. The pictures have never looked better. It's also available as a 7X7 paperback that will almost fit in your pocket. For real portability, the iBook version looks great even on a tiny iPhone. My bookstore at Blurb: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The Tube Cutter is last on the line. Here Randy is Tube Cutter. He runs the controls that turn the shaft that rotates the fingers that lift the tube and deposit it on his conveyor. He also runs similar fingers that get the tube from the tube puller and drop it into the water tank. Finally, his controls also run a band saw that cuts the raw end of the tube where the die has been removed. In theory, he should never have to touch the tube.

When he's finished, the work of the extruder is done, but work on the tube is often just beginning.

Bob

2011-12-02T22:35:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Where were we? Oh yes, the extruder! As dragons go, this one's getting on in years, and she's frequently cranky. Imagine how many moving parts there are to become arthritic! Imagine how many systems and sub-systems from the heater man's station behind Bob beneath the blue pane of glass, where the copper blocks begin their trip through the extruder...

...to this, foreground shaft that rotates fingers that lift the newly extruded tube from the murky, green water of the cooling tank, and deliver it to the extruder's final conveyor system? How many shafts and fingers, knuckles and gears strung into differentials all turned on cue by electrical systems and hydraulic systems and nervous systems? How many heating systems and cooling systems, and pipes and ducts, knuckles and hoses with their loads to channel and discharge?

The dragon simmers 24/7 and has been doing so, I understand, pretty continuously for seventy years - seventy years of tuning and oiling and tightening and patching and adapting by a succession of operators, mechanics, and engineers who told each other what to listen for, which hoses to watch to keep the beast happy and keep the work moving. Here she is, still running - quite amazing, really.

Fern Hill Farm

2011-11-30T22:54:00.000-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Fern Hill Farm is a short distance from the burned barns at Hanover Hill. It is another great, hollow shed that misses the lowing of cattle. The barns of Fern Hill are tall and dark, and they loom from a perch part way up the side of the valley. I have tried a number of times to make a photograph of them. This is the closest I've come.

While I was there hunt dogs were following scents in the wooded hillside above the barns. Their yapping and yelping echoed oddly under the long, low, metal roof where the barns had been expanded. At first it sounded like people talking, but eventually one of the hunt dogs followed the scent to the edge of a barnyard, revealed himself as the source of the noise, and would not be deterred for anything from the chase. I heard no guns.

It is clear these barns were home to a very significant herd as was Hanover Hill, and a bit further west is Hiddenhurst and there are two more a bit south whose names I don't know, all empty, all falling, a valley full of cattle turned to empty fields and pasture. Sturdy as these barns look, they are already falling and unsafe.

Sunset on Hanover Hill

2011-11-28T22:03:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

The House on Hanover Hill

She remembered:

Waking early,
the scent of fresh hay already in her dreams
and something else she couldn't recall
in the corner bedroom where the peeping sun first peaked.

How her fingers
repolished the banister down the stairs!
wet sneakers in dewy grass,
her bicycle, propped against the great maple that defined the yard.

Standing in the center of the center field,
rowed corn measuring the hills' undulations,
the amber waves, a quilter's celebration,
concentric reverberations as far as vision,

And the bicycle
slipping on the sand as her leg
dodging ruts, coasting, freewheeling, carefree
swung safely on to the saddle

The colors in crystal
green, golden, ruby red beside the onion braids,
in rowed procession gleaming
and the smell of cinnamon and turpentine in the pantry closet.
Fragrance of cedar
like a premonition
when they brought in the old, wooden chests
and laid in the curtains and linens and dishes and all.

another view of the Farm on Hanover Hill: http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/04/poised-for-spring.html

Nameless

2011-11-27T19:15:00.000-05:00

NOTES:

1. Photographer and friend Martin Kimmeldorf has combined my photograph, "Paper Trail" (http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/10/paper-trail.html) with a photo of his own. The combined image can be seen on his site here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinsphotoart/6291876054/in/photostream.

2. My son, Emery, has been making some beautiful jewelry from some very surprising materials and has a web page showing some of his work and offering it for sale. You can learn about it at: http://ER3Designs.etsy.com.

3. Only 1 DAY LEFT to take 25% from orders of Blurb books at the Blurb Bookstore. Use promo code ZOOM to claim your savings. Prison - The Shape of Freedom is available in in two sizes. Small is 7"X7". Purchasing it with a hard cover gives it a bit of heft. The large is 12'X12" and comes in regular and deluxe versions. There is also an ebook version so inexpensive it's almost like stealing..

Blurb Bookstore: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

Rimy Cell

2011-11-26T20:02:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: One of the pleasures of this series has been the number of people who have written to describe where the images have led their thoughts. This is one of three images in the book, all new, that appear at climactic moments and without any text. I'm always interested in hearing where such images take willing imaginations and what trajectory they have followed.

TWO MORE DISCOUNT DAYS: Prison - the Shape of Freedom is at the Blurb Bookstore now. Preview it online or order a copy for the holiday. Order by Nov. 28th and use promo code ZOOM to save 25%.

Now also available inexpensively as an ebook. Select the small, 7X7 version (http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2664010) to purchase the ebook version. As the type appears larger in the small version of the book, only that one has been released as an ebook.

BLURB BOOKSTORE: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

Prison Cell, the Colors of Time

2011-11-25T23:38:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Although prisons abound, most of us know them only from the outside and at a great distance. Yet their symbols inhabit our history, our news and our dreams. Hospitals are about our frailty, death, heroism. Schools are about growing and striving. Prisons are about walls.

For each image, there came a time while working on it when my involvement with it led to words. This image appeared just as I went to conclude the analogy above.

Prison - the Shape of Freedom is at the Blurb Bookstore now. Preview it online or order a copy for the holiday. Order by Nov. 28th and use promo code ZOOM to save 25%.

The book comes in two sizes. Small is 7"X7". Getting it with a hard cover gives it a bit of heft. The large is 12'X12" and comes in regular and deluxe versions.

Blurb Bookstore: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

Thanksgiving Reflection

2011-11-23T16:05:00.000-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I'm thankful for many things this November. Among them are those who read and especially those who take the time to sometimes respond to this blog post. May all find plenty of pie and whipped cream this Thanksgiving.

Windswept

2011-11-22T19:01:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Windswept

To hold the fluid moment,
make it strike an attitude
as roots cling and clouds blow and
leaves turn and fall and
purlins crack and
mountains shift and
shores.

Can any photographer ask for more?

REMINDER: Prison - The Shape of Freedom is now available at the Blurb Bookstore, and I'm told orders placed before November 28th, can receive a 25% discount by entering the code word ZOOM at checkout. You can preview the first pages of the book now at the Blurb bookstore: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii. Don't forget to click into full-screen mode.

Prison - The Shape of Freedom (cover)

2011-11-20T20:21:00.002-05:00

TIME OUT: I pause the usual journal for a commercial message. Just in time for holiday gift giving, I have edited, revised, and extended the prison journals into a book, Prison, the Shape of Freedom.

It is available at the Blurb Bookstore, and I'm told orders placed before November 28th, can receive a 25% discount by entering the code word ZOOM at checkout. You can preview the first pages of the book now at the Blurb bookstore: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii. Don't forget to click into full-screen mode.

This is more than a republication. Working on it has been a process of discovery. The distance of autumn has offered me perspective on decisions made intuitively last spring. As I added and edited pictures and text, it often felt more like I was finding the shape within rather than pasting on. I hope that those who followed the blog will agree.

The book is available in two sizes and three bindings. Deluxe versions at both sizes are printed on fine, uncoated paper. Give the gift of prison to find the shape of freedom.

Blurb: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

Copper Tube Boogie-Woogie

2011-11-19T19:40:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The die hanger has controls to operate the die head and the conveyors that move the new tube. Jose is die hanger, but usually he works at the other end of the factory, trimming the end off nearly finished tubes. It takes three men to free the pipe from the extruder. While the die hanger controls the movement of the die head and conveyors, the system operator manipulates a bar that knocks the dies apart and frees the tube. Meanwhile the tube puller, Bob, helps the tube along its conveyor, disposes of waste, and recycles the various dies.

In the background, John prepares another load of scrap to travel back to Ansonia while a bouquet of blocks flies toward us for the heater man. Somewhere beneath the bouquet of blocks must be Carlos with the controls for the crane.

Die Hanger

2011-11-18T21:49:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: If the block was hot enough when the ram began squeezing, only a bit of rim from the block will remain at the end of the new tube; one can never squeeze out that last bit of toothpaste. If the block was not hot enough, the ram will seize up before it is done pushing all of the copper through the cutting dies. Whatever is left of the block will hang like a stump on the new pipe. Spike, the die hanger, works the controls that slide the die head assembly forward exposing the stump at the back so it can be cut off.

As the saw cuts, push dies cool on the slide tables and on the hydraulic platform on which they fall after extrusion.

Dragon Master

2011-11-15T15:03:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Those who were there recall the day the extruder exploded like a gun shooting the block and shrapnel down the factory floor. At the end of the conveyor that leads from the extruder there is an iron plate to intercept such trajectories; though it is little match for what might be fired at it. On the iron plate someone has drawn a panicked face in chalk. The combination of immense pressure and intense heat inside the dragon can make for nasty dyspepsia.

The system operator is the dragon master. Fred is the system operator. He tunes and adjusts the beast and oversees operation from the master controls. Each job requires a different configuration of dies and other interchangeable parts, and the machine is enveloped in pipes for cooling and heating and hydraulic control. Fred must watch and manage them all.

How does one learn to feed and care for an ancient dragon, the last of its species? Fred says he learned from the previous operator. Before that he worked as a tool maker. There's a back-up System Operator if Fred has to be out. Are they also the last of their species? When asked why he's the one working the extruder Fred says, "None of the other guys wanted to."

Extrusion

2011-11-10T12:47:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When the crank is pulled the dragon tenses, clanking begins, a funnel of steam puffs from a stack, and hydraulic muscles bulge shining forearms that push the ram. The ram pushes the push-die and the block into the greased container. The extruder moves like a living thing; torso segmented, the groin pushes forward as the chest hunches back to take in the block. As the block slides into the container the ram inserts a mandrel, like a long tongue, down through the center of the push-die and block so that the semi-molten donut of copper is totally contained within massive steel.

And then she whines and wheezes, squeezes and wines, 2700 lbs per square inch of pressure squeezing, wheezing copper as if it were paste through the cutting die at the end of the container. From the sides of the ram come puffs of smoke and licks of flame as the grease inside the container is seared away, but at the front, the dragon's mouth roars flames, puffs sparks, breathes fire as a glowing tube of copper slowly grows.

Ready to Load

2011-11-08T18:12:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: There is a pregnant moment, after the heater man has sent the block, and the machine op takes control and loads the extruder. The elevator drops, and the die man rolls the steel push-die down the slot (in the center of the picture) and into position behind the block. The machine op hits a button, and a plunger pushes the push-die and block over a bridge to the last elevator. Another button lifts the elevator which rotates 90 degrees as it rises and leaves block and push-die ready between the ram and the container.

Finally the machine op pulls on the long, steel lever that comes out of the floor, and hydraulics the size of a large, freight truck engage for action. The dragon of the foundry was a tin dragon with a pot of gold. This dragon has the muscle and hot fury to transform this short gold block into a long, glowing tube.

Heater Man

2011-11-06T13:57:00.005-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The heater man is the first of five. It takes five men to run the extruder. Nobody sees the heater man. He's back, behind ovens and conveyors, behind the yellow rail, watching graphs and temperatures, maintaining his equipment, waiting in a narrow passage against the back wall where there's barely pacing space. His equipment is noticeably newer than elsewhere in the factory, but he's all alone. When a block is hot, from somewhere behind the ovens, the heater man pushes a button, and 300 lbs of hot copper moves down the track, appears and stops, a glowing, orange beacon in front of the system operator.

I have not yet captured a good photo of Miguel, the heater man, but his title has provoked the following bit of nonsense, perhaps inspiration for a future portrait.

Song of the Heater Man
(to be accompanied by steam puffs, clanking steel and the sultry whine of the straining extruder)

Heater man,
where does he stand?
watching the graphs
watching the heat

Behind the ovens,
watching, waiting,
no pacing space
for the heater man.

When he pushes the button
the hot block rolls
but nobody sees
the heater man.

Nobody sees
the heater man,
meter man,
watching the heat.

The Extruder

2011-11-04T11:16:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This is the last of the brass in the Valley of Brass. The first time I entered and photographed here I looked around and saw a plume of smoke or steam puffing steadily into the joists of the factory shed, and I turned my camera that way. I later learned that was where the whine of straining engines came from, and the heavy clank of steel striking steel so you felt it in the souls of your feet. Without realizing it I had composed a telling photo of the extruder, the most important piece of equipment in the factory. It is the last of its kind, nothing else like it in the country.

When I took that photo I was standing somewhere down the floor from here. Now I am standing at the main controls looking back. Breaktime is almost over.

Autumn Barn

2011-11-02T14:09:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Hollow Together

Hillside barn
hollow with age,
no longer fit for the stacked hay,
even,
stares into the valley
where the works have closed.

Breaktime No.2, Hendey Corp.

2011-10-28T18:45:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Break Time

In the whoosh
of the closer
opening,
bathroom secrets
hushed.

To be told later.

Paper Trail

2011-10-21T12:18:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Paper Trail

Factories closed,
vagabond files loosed on the wind,
wretched refuse of the predigital world,
teeming on our shores.

Sweet Dreams

2011-10-18T22:34:00.004-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Files at an abandoned concrete factory.

NOTE: Best viewed at large size by clicking on the image.

Accounting

2011-10-16T17:18:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In the WWI shed, the extrusion crew works to right the push-die behind the block, and copper tubes soak in vats of blue acid, and buckets of scrap sail downstream on the hooks of cranes. Everyone there wears ear plugs, but up the dark back stairs of the older, brick factory, where the floors are gritty, only creaky risers and my shuffling footsteps bestir the quiet.

On the abandoned second floor, the filtered, gray window-light is a pall over reality which lives in the shadows. I strain to hear the source of distant buzzing, perhaps the complaint of an errant electrical circuit, back from the dead. Further up, beyond the broken clock with the crippled fingers, the world is increasingly pigeon-haunted. It's best to creep when traversing time. Up there, other than pigeons, there's only drafts, drips, and the creaks of age; then on the third floor, a flash, the flapping of black wings flying at light.

It is like crossing to the other side. The sawtooth rooftop beyond the windows rouses shadows in offices where clerks with fine hands kept accounts for Holmes, Booth, & Haydens. Dutifully they enter into ledgers the sales of planished, copper-silver photographic plates that will capture the daguerreotype faces of a generation (HB&H were the first to make them). Their flowing letters also record production and sales of crisp, brass oil burners whose delicate gears, touched by countless fingertips, control the glow of lamps round the world (Hiram W. Hayden held more than 30 oil lamp patents). And later, when fine and flowing were obsolete, typewriters spit orders faster and stayed abreast of new products and new demands. One can almost see the shadows of clerks flicker in the broken, glass cubicles of some subsequent reform to achieve new, strategic efficiencies, and you can hear their whispers in the rustling of feathers and occasional murmurs, clucks and coos. A rusted Addressograph stands amid a scattered heap of stamped address plates spilled from file drawers, the forgotten contact list of Anaconda Copper, never to be re-alphabetized.

Squirt

2011-10-10T21:04:00.011-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In the 1820s extrusion, a new technology, was called squirting. The extrusion press is the giant machine that I photographed puffing steam on my first visit to the factory. It is definitely a mega-squirter. It requires five men to run, and it combines the best features of two classic toys supersized.

The conveyor system that feeds blocks to the extruder begins at a four track bin and might double as pretty good electric trains. A swing bridge that pivots around one corner carries blocks across an aisle and aligns them to sidetracks that feed three ovens. It's an intriguing system, but it has apparently been abandoned. However, the trip from ovens is still pretty good railroading.

One at a time each hot block is sent down the conveyor from its oven. My Lionels never carried glowing hot metal. At right turns the blocks become 300 lb. wheels rolling to the next conveyor before advancing again. On the way to the extruder the hot block is first lowered and then raised and turned on elevators, until it is finally positioned between the extruder's maw, more politely called the container, and its giant ram, The ram is powered by 50 feet of hydraulics that make a throbbing, sad, metallic whine as they crush. Play-Doh, anyone?

Fred has momentarily stopped the extrusion press as it is lifting and rotating the next block into position to be plunged through the press's cutting die. The steel push-die (commonly called the dummy) that is supposed to protect the mandrel has fallen over. Someone must go in beside the block and the constantly dripping, cooling water and right the push-die with a crow bar before the process can continue and the ram mandrel do their tubular work.

Stacking Blocks No.2

2011-10-07T19:07:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: ...but they don't make kettles here. They make tubing in various alloys of copper and in large diameters and lengths according to order, and they make it seamless, without welds. It's another of the brass-makers' tricks.

Tubing made with a seam along the side is tubing with a scar, a weakness, a place to fail. On a submarine in the salty depths, on a cruise ship full of people, in a nuclear cooling facility near towns and cities seamless tubing is the required spec. This is the only place in the United States where it's made. The process and the remaining extruder have been passed down to current operators from American Copper and Brass (successor company to Holmes, Booth and Hayden) through Anaconda (once a tyrant of industry and now a bad debt carried by Atlantic Richfield Corporation).

The lathe in the background is one of many abandoned relics rusting and collecting dust amid the slowed flow of shiny blocks. These blocks, cast and milled to various specifications, are all of the exact diameter for the ancient, monster extruder that has been moaning and mewling from the other end of the factory since the beginning of time. It is the last of its breed.

Stacking Blocks No.1

2011-10-06T14:29:00.001-05:00

STEVE JOBS quoting STEWART BRAND from The Whole Earth Catalog: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Touch it. Freshly lathed and drilled blocks are irresistible. Run your hands over the crisp edges and across the smooth, gently rippling surfaces. Rap one with your knuckle to hear its damped resonance. Try to lift it (They weigh about 300 lbs ea) to feel its heft. They seem thoroughly solid, but the brass men who formed Holmes, Booth, and Haydens had a much deeper understanding of copper, and they used it to make simple things better, cheaper, faster.

Hiram W. Hayden was an inventor and held more patents for manufacturing processes than anyone else in the industry. On Dec. 16, 1851 he received his first patent revolutionizing one of life's most ubiquitous essentials, the common, copper kettle. The traditional way of manufacturing a copper kettle was on a machine that stamped a disk of metal between a succession of dies, gradually stretching the bottom and compressing the sides up and in until the final set of dies stamped the kettle into kettle shape. As Hayden explained in his patent renewal, the old method is always trying to knock the bottom off the kettle, damaging the metal and making it thin at the bottom where it needs to be thick, and thick at the top where it should be thin. The metal is pounded and damaged at precisely the points where it must take greatest stress.

Hiram Hayden's patent calls for spinning a disk of copper and a succession of forms together on a lathe-like machine while an appropriate tool gradually presses the metal and draws it into the desired kettle shape. This method reduces the number of steps in the kettle-making process and the number of times the metal must be annealed between tooling, and it produces a kettle thick at the bottom where it takes punishment and thin at the top where it should be light. The metal is not abused while being processed and the resulting kettle is better, cheaper, and more durable. Hiram Hayden understood the fluid nature of the his metals, the value of spin, and how to engineer a machine that would take advantage of these. Was this the spirit that gave American industry its early vitality? If so, it is also the spirit exemplified in the life of Steve Jobs who died yesterday and whose work touched each of us profoundly and changed the world.

You can see the drawings and read the patent application for Hayden's kettle-making machine here.

Stairway to Heaven

2011-10-01T09:48:00.004-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Picnic by the millpond, 1968,
the girl, the car, the moon!

Lathe

2011-09-30T14:46:00.000-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Lathes and drill presses, like potters wheels and compasses and gyroscopes and the music that used to gyrate from phonographs and that game at carnivals where kids paint on whirling plates, all partake in the magic of spin. Spin has the feel of life. The wheel is only a circle until you feel the forces spiraling out, rotating, translating, revolving into corkscrew sprays of centripetal blossoms. They tell us DNA is the way spin gets into our marrow.

When I was a kid, of all the tools in our high school shop, it was the lathes that received the most respect, and each of us looked forward to our turn at making something on them. Until we got to the lathes, shop was about making boxes. I can still feel the jolt of that spinning and the current of vibration, while steadying my chisel on the fixed ledge of the lathe and my eye on the spinning block and then drawing a smooth curve that instantly sprung into three dimensional space. It was the exquisite physics of circular motion that turned boxy wood into fluid shapes, sent pedestal trays and bowls home to mom and dad and occasionally sent shards of bowl and classmates flying across the shop. There's alchemy in spin.

The lathe brings final precision to the block. Dennis centers the 300 pound block around the hole and positions the cutting blade. When he starts the block spinning the blade will move steadily, evenly, automatically along the block's surface, peeling away excess copper and leaving a perfect cylinder, shiny and smooth. The diameter will be precise to within hundredths of an inch.

When the block is removed it is finished, ready for transformation.

Drilled

2011-09-28T17:38:00.002-05:00

MARSHALL McLUHAN: "We shape our tools. And then our tools shape us."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: A moment of homage, please, for the utility of the thumb which came to us by way of the trees and gave us tools and the brains to use them and so brought us here to the wonders of 19th century toolmaking capped by 20th century button making that allows the thumb some leisure while the index finger alone stops the drill press. The hole is complete. The open door reveals a nest of copper shavings which accumulate by the ton and fill scrap hampers on there way back to Ansonia to be recast, and the flow of copper continues, while thumbs and index fingers everywhere are moving on to iPads and dissolving in cyberspace.

Crystal Palace

2011-09-27T13:38:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Imagine the drill bit needed to drill these solid, copper blocks from end to end, the tempered hardness of its edge. Imagine the force of the motor and the jaws that hold the block while the bit turns. Fred minds Gisholt while it bores the hole while midday sun pours through the WWI louvered wndows. I wonder, do the louvers still work?

Billets to Blocks

2011-09-24T19:40:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Dave cuts billets into blocks according to custom specifications. Carlos moves a ceaseless stream of billets onto a gravity fed conveyor where they wait for Dave to roll the next billet onto the rollers of his saw's conveyor. He measures where to cut, positions the billet under the saw blade, and starts the saw. He stamps a number onto the edge of each block after it is cut and records the number in a computer terminal. Once stamped, the stream of copper continues as Dave piles blocks onto pallets. Each block weighs about 300 pounds and will wear its number until it is transformed.

Stair Landing

2011-09-23T12:06:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Between Stories

On the way up
or down
in a trice
in the well
in between,
pause and borrow some moment,
but don't
smoke.
Danger!

This is inside the brick building pictured a few days ago on TODAY'S. It was probably built by Holmes, Booth and Haydens sometime between 1870 and 1880. Only the first floor is in use as the tooling shop for the mill where the billets are still processed. The other floors once held additional machine shops, offices, and at one time the second floor may have been used to manufacture the brass, burner mechanisms for oil lamps.

In Transit

2011-09-21T21:50:00.004-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: They fly through the air with the greatest of stress. Each billet weighs, Carlos estimates, between one and two tons. He has learned to move evenly and to guide their enormous mass with masterful delicacy. If there is alchemy here, it is in that learned touch.

John and Carlos keep copper in motion beneath the old sawtooth roof built quickly by American Copper just as the United States was gearing up for World War I, and immigrants were streaming up the Naugatuck Valley to factory villages and ethnic neighborhoods and churches and labor unions that all spoke the mother tongue. Just beyond the glass wall of the factory the Naugatuck Line cut its channel through the buildings, yards, and activity. Many of the buildings are still there but they're empty now. Further across the tracks there was a neighborhood where the highway now runs. What is the mass of such shifting culture, the touch that might steady it, and how does it whiplash through time?

Rolling Mill Playground

2011-09-18T17:34:00.010-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

The truck with Mike's billets arrives here at what's left of the old Brass City campus of American Brass, though old-timers and historians may know it as Holmes, Booth, & Hayden or Benedict & Burnham, but it's the same company. Tracing the old buildings' pedigrees through mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures reveals continuity through changing names.

Even today the factory is an enormous beast made of many buildings that hugs both sides of the Naugatuck River at a point just before the Mad River adds its waters to the flow south. Once it was an industrial tiger. At least a dozen buildings remain, but most are empty shells. The flow of brass is down to a trickle now, and the trains that carried it are gone. It is as if the beast is moribund, cooling and diminished to one building at the center where Mike's billets arrive to be made into tube. From this field I can still hear the growling engines that power the mill and make the copper glow.

I spotted this angle on a walk around the neighborhood, but I was on the wrong side of a chain link fence, trying to shoot between the links. As for neighborhood, my side of the fence was more like a cheerless, crumbling corridor funneling cars and occasional pedestrians toward a gap beneath the north-south infrastructure of highways and partially abandoned train lines. It is the only place where people from communities on the east and west sides of the valley might drearily get across for a visit. I appreciated their trek. Getting from where I stood on the wrong of the fence from a decent picture was a long way around, and at the time I was going the other way.

Only later did I find my way to the right side of the fence through a retailer's parking area. The lot I'm standing in is behind his one-story structure selling lighting fixtures and other building supplies. The chain link fence is his and he closes it each evening after work. He almost locked me in. It appears he once stored sand or gravel here. Is it the bad housing market that has let the meadow in? Tonight I learned that Google Maps has a name for this meadow between the dying beast and the traffic's rush; they call it "Rolling Mill Playground," and the city of Waterbury considers it as, "public parkland," that must be protected.

Founder's Lair

2011-09-15T21:55:00.000-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Squirrels hide their acorns in the empty Hendey factory in Torrington, while downstream, at the bottom of the valley, where the old sailing ships used to come up from the sea, the last of the old brass mills chugs on. We're back at the foundry where MIke is still pouring copper billets.

Mike is the beginning of the process. At the front of the shed, beside the train track, a flatbed truck is unloading scrap buckets from the processing mill halfway up the track, up the river, up the valley in Brass City. The billets Mike casts here will leave there as copper tube. I'm told this working, pre-WWII production line is the last of its kind. I wonder what the squirrels think of that.

You're It!

2011-09-12T18:42:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Back on the track this morning at dawn, this time following the rail line behind the Hendey site where three tracks of the old Naugatuck Railroad used to cross through the center of Torrington on their way north. Service reaches only as far as Waterbury, but track is used as far up as Thomaston; the idle track continuing north is overgrown here and stops completely a half mile further on, a little past where the old depot used to be. Not even a trace is left of the roadbed that once got up to WInsted.

Pigeons have taken over the third floor and attic of this 1908 Hendey, factory building, but only the squirrels know their way through those holes on the second floor and through other sciurine perforations to where their nuts are stored.

The Source

2011-09-10T19:00:00.000-05:00

by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1827:

The River

And I behold once more
My old familiar haunts; here the blue river,
The same blue wonder that my infant eye
Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came,--
Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed
The fragrant flag-roots in my father's fields,
And where thereafter in the world he went.
Look, here he is, unaltered, save that now
He hath broke his banks and flooded all the vales
With his redundant waves.
Here is the rock where, yet a simple child,
I caught with bended pin my earliest fish,
Much triumphing,--and these the fields
Over whose flowers I chased the butterfly,
A blooming hunter of a fairy fine.
And hark! where overhead the ancient crows
Hold their sour conversation in the sky:--
These are the same, but I am not the same,
But wiser than I was, and wise enough
Not to regret the changes, tho' they cost
Me many a sigh. Oh, call not Nature dumb;
These trees and stones are audible to me,
These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,
I understand their faery syllables,
And all their sad significance. The wind,
That rustles down the well-known forest road--
It hath a sound more eloquent than speech.
The stream, the trees, the grass, the sighing wind,
All of them utter sounds of 'monishment
And grave parental love.
They are not of our race, they seem to say,
And yet have knowledge of our moral race,
And somewhat of majestic sympathy,
Something of pity for the puny clay,
That holds and boasts the immeasurable mind.
I feel as I were welcome to these trees
After long months of weary wandering,
Acknowledged by their hospitable boughs;
They know me as their son, for side by side,
They were coeval with my ancestors,
Adorned with them my country's primitive times,
And soon may give my dust their funeral shade.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Once there was a sawmill here at Campbell's Falls, high up in Connecticut's hills and just west of the Naugatuck Valley, but industry played out early, and tranquility has had the upper hand ever since. Water that passes here takes the long route to Ansonia via the Housatonic. Rain that falls just a bit west follows an express route via the Naugatuck to the same destination.

In Memoriam

2011-09-09T18:22:00.005-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: They tell me energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only transformed and that the whole is never greater than the sum of its parts. Is it bird that still burns in the desiccating bird? Do the old habits of organization linger in the dissipating heat or drift among dust motes? What does spirit weigh? What is the coefficient of conversion for wisdom passed from old to young, and what happens to those energies when the wisdom is garbled or lost?

Phoenix-like

2011-09-08T19:56:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Phoenix-like

Fluttering
at the top of the
Hendey Tower
in the updraft
where rocks
chipped the mansard and
smashed the window,
the green hanging folders,
analog bequest
of Hendey,
flop across the floor.

NOTE: The Hendey Company, a major manufacturer of precision, industrial lathes and other metalworking machinery was established in Torrington, Connecticut, near the top of the Naugatuck Valley in 1874. The distinctive Victorian tower of the old factory offices was the gateway to the main campus. Here is a short history of the company with a photo showing the campus in 1896. Much of the campus survives but has been empty many years.

Ansonian Basilica

2011-09-06T18:34:00.021-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Most who replied to the last two blog journals wrote to praise, "ruin porn" or to reassure me. I wasn't really questioning my chosen subject matter but hoping to investigate the impulse that leads me and others to shoot among ruins. What draws us? What shades of mystery are there? What can be learned? One friend, a university Latin and Classics scholar, wrote, "You undertand, my entire profession is grounded in 'ruin porn.'"

Another friend, however, in an extended exchange was bothered by my link of rusting, factories such as the one in Unplugged to my images of, old, rotting corn husks, lilies rising from the mud of a pond bottom, ice melting at the end of winter, and bugs in a small universe. Corn husks, pond lilies, winter freeze, and bugs are living things that regenerate, he suggested, they are part of an ongoing cycle and transcend their passing. Well, I suppose my friend had fully accepted the challenge I was proposing, and I understood that in a very real sense those links connect to places inside me where my friend feels uncomfortable.

Over the course of several exchanges my friend proposed we make make an odyssey together through ruin beauty, and we agreed on an itinerary for our explorations. Destinations included several abandoned factories, the "trunkless legs" of King Ozymandias somewhere in a desert, the Acropolis in Athens, and Edward Hopper's "Nighthawk" neighborhood. All seemed excellent vistas from which to both gawk at and examine the wreck.

It took almost two, parched months to locate Ozymandias. A time traveler who was into geocaching provided the final clue, and the trek ended in many miles of apparently endless, rolling dunes, as our GPS zoomed in on the coordinates. We were both amazed at how little of the king was left and paused before getting close. My friend looked at it in total despair while I took a drink from my flask. To me it was both troubling and comforting, and as I knelt before it I allowed the soft, warm sand to run through my fingers.

"Ach, these are lifeless things!" my friend cursed, and decided to take no photos, but he cried a bit and then sniffed, as if a bit disgusted with his bit of sentiment. I walked around looking for a long time. In truth, it's a very moving place to me. One can still make out the face and a sneer I thought I recognized. I took several photos, but the one I like best I took from a distant dune on the trek back with the legs just visible and sticking above a wide horizon of dunes.

When we got to the Acropolis my friend was instantly excited. The sun was beginning to set, the clouds made god-like forms in the sky, and he ran around capturing beautiful images of the ruin and admiring them on his Blackberry. I half expected him to capture chariots in the sky. He made triumphant images of the Temple of Athena Nike raked by orange sunset light that edged every crack and detail. In other shots he caught the caryatids silhouetted against beautiful orange sky. The light in his pictures gave to the ruins the appearance of eternal glory.

As he danced after images, a stooped, old, market woman passed me, and I asked her about the poor condition of the building. I thought she would complain about the Turks who blew it up a few centuries ago, but instead she railed against the populace who had become disenchanted with government after surrender to the Spartans. Some insisted that all tribute to the Spartans be deducted from town upkeep, and an ordinance was passed prohibiting tax increases. Meanwhile my friend kept photographing, but I preferred to wait until the morning of our flight out of Athens, when the smog of the modern city again lifted its curtain of gray haze between my lens and the ruin.

Our flight back was long, and my friend spent the time talking to the guy in the aisle seat, an insurance salesman from Cleveland. We reached the Nighthawk around two in the morning. My friend had been yawning since nine, but I was just beginning to feel sufficiently noir. As we came in to the diner two men at the counter got up silently to leave, and when they reached the street, turned in opposite directions. There was a red-headed woman asleep at a booth in the back. My friend sat down at the counter and ordered a black coffee to keep him awake, but I was too excited to wait for him.

Street lights, the window light from closed shops and the bright diner sign bounced off shop windows and splashed colored light in all directions across the empty streets while setting off areas of deep shadow. I walked around like a voyeur looking for the occasional glow of the insomniac's lair or the chance to photograph someone yawning from an open window or to catch an unguarded moment behind a curtain. I shot all that night, it was too good to miss, knowing I'd never make an image that came near the power of Nighthawk but delighting in the pleasures of discovery. I looked in several times at the all night diner, but early on my friend had moved to a booth and gone to sleep on his back with his feet projecting into the aisle next to where the red-headed woman lay dreaming of a new hat. When I finally woke him to leave the light had just crept up, and we heard the sparrows in the gutters.

We reached Ansonia before 10 AM. I thought it might help if my friend saw the factory before it was in ruins, and we arrived in 1942 when workers were busy producing equipment for the war effort. There were many more women in the factory than before the war, and during break they shared letters from the front. There was an energy to the place that was thrilling. An older foreman told us about when his grandfather, who spoke little English, had worked here. The union struggles had all gone badly, but in the end many families had done well. I thought it might help if we climbed to one of the high, overlooking windows above the work floor to glimpse the old grandeur of the place, but it was already getting late, the hallway was dark, and at the top of the stairs we smelled rotting pigeons and turned back. Most of the old machinery is gone now, but to me it is still one of the grandest architectural spaces in the area, though fallen on hard times. I'd be interested in any information on the rusty, round columns that support the rails for the 30 ton crane. Perhaps the order should be referred to as, "Ansonian."

2011-09-03T17:36:00.002-05:00

Unplugged

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: "Ruin porn"? That my pictures lack social purpose, I freely admit. I admit also that if staging is dishonest, I am guilty. I have waited for people to move off camera so I could, maybe, catch the desolation that lay between a shadow and a crumbling wall, though people were bustling all around; and I've turned away from a thriving new supermarket on one side of the street in order to photograph on the other side the eyeless eyes of a ruined factory where broken mullions still clung to shards of glass. Once, I even copped a sky. My aim is not to provide documentation.

As to the charge of gawking, I recognize there may be others who feel the pain of the ruin more immediately and materially than I do, and I sympathize with them. However, the accident belongs to all of us; it is ongoing, and we are all gawkers and eventual victims, though most among us, myself included, haven't quite acknowledged how personally and totally we are involved. We gawk to satisfy a yearning for answers to questions that lie beyond understanding. If such a thing as art exists, surely it has something to do with this kind of inquest.

Of course such meditations may be spun, not only from building ruins, but from old, rotting corn husks, from lilies rising from the mud of a pond bottom, or even from ice melting at the end of winter. I've seen the questions appear within a small universe defined by a window and a storm window on an old barn. Is the essential mystery the fluid impermanence of all things, the stealthy way today has of suddenly being tomorrow or the day after, with half shadows of many yesterdays, as if all creation were nothing but a never-ending palimpsest swirling by us, calling to us to pay attention and see where we fit?

Of all the ruined, old, factory sheds I have photographed, this is the most boundless, dark, and mysterious. Several large sheds huddle side-by-side, bay after bay, up the hill from the Naugatuck River. Between, up, around and over the sheds, masonry walls melt to a tangle of stairs, passageways workshops and offices clustered in crevices. In some places stairs ascend to balconies, high up doorways and catwalks; and in other places concrete steps descend beneath the slab and into darkness. Once a workforce of many thousands were busy here making large machinery for world-wide manufacturing. Machines too large to fit on a railroad car could be loaded on barges and sent downstream to the harbor in Bridgeport. Giant cranes lie rusting overhead. Now it is a salvage warehouse for what look like used, power components from other idle or demolished factories; it is a landscape of imported wreckage.

Idling Crane

2011-08-28T18:30:00.006-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It has been dubbed, "ruin porn," identified as a currently fashionable genre of photography, and criticized for the irresponsible damage it does. The controversy was triggered by two photo books on the architectural ruins of Detroit, and much of the criticism came initially from champions for Detroit renewal. Detroit arguably shares with Chernobyl title to being the most spectacular collapse of industrial civilization on the planet. Detroit is more accessible than Chernobyl and has, therefore, become a small tourist mecca for the, "thrill seekers." To many Detroiters they are unwelcome.

I can't deny enjoying the thrill of exploring an old, abandoned site, and so it's appropriate to consider the complaint against photographs like mine and the reasons behind it. The crux of the argument as I understand it is that such photography is bad press, that it only makes matters worse for the real people who live amid the blight, and that it only serves to satisfy the frivolous yearnings of gawkers; it is, therefore, exploitive.

What is it that draws me to photograph ruins of all sorts, urban rural, industrial, or ancient? Is it a "thrill," only, nothing more than the pleasure of scratching an itch, or is it something worth focusing on? Does it have any power to unlock feelings or deepen understanding?

Corn

2011-08-26T22:20:00.002-05:00

NOTE: I'm pleased to announce that this photo was one of several photographs awarded "Honorable Mention" at the art show of the Jewish Community Center in Sherman this evening. It was an excellent exhibition. All the prizes were given to paintings, so it's especially gratifying to receive this recognition.

Because of storm warnings in anticipation of hurricane Irene, the exhibition has been shortened and will not be open Sunday as originally planned. There's still time to get there tomorrow, Saturday from 10 to 5.

2011-08-25T12:11:00.003-05:00

NOTE: The Jewish Community Center in Sherman, Connecticut, will be holding their annual juried art show this weekend, August 26-28. The opening with reception and awards will be on Friday from 5-7. The show will be open on Saturday from 10 AM to 5 PM and on Sunday from 10 AM to 2 PM. For additional info go to http://www.jccinsherman.org/ or call 860 355-8050.

Machinist's Still Life

2011-08-25T11:55:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Still Life

The
still life
tells
the story
of life
not quite still,
still
life.

The Founder

2011-08-23T18:59:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Google Earth reveals dozens of factory sheds along the river at the foot of what was once called, "Brass Valley." The foundry takes up a portion of one shed. It is probably the last major piece of the old technology still running anywhere on the rusty campus.

On the day I took this picture the temperature outside was pushing toward 100 degrees, and it was considerably hotter inside the foundry. The normally waxy air was pudding. I can only imagine what it was like at the console beside the furnace where Mike works all day. Except when the billets are pulled from the form, he generally works alone. The console lets him monitor the all-important temperature of the brew, control the melt and tip the crucible to set the correct flow. The copper must be poured slowly, and the molds are large, so much of his time is spent waiting beside the furnace. Periodically he rakes out the channel through which the molten copper is flowing, and the rake showers him in sparks. However, most of the action comes at the end of the process, when the billets are hoisted by crane from the molds and the furnace is reset and charged for the next pour.

As Mike went on break between pours, I tried to catch a casual shot of him with the foundry behind, but when he saw the camera he stopped and posed proudly.

At the Cutting Edge No.2

2011-08-19T19:55:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Shift

Amid the foundry's hollow rumble:
the shapes of idle benches trace
the path of spectral pipe
that circumnavigated the globe,
and a sign from OSHA rots and warns
where grease of absent fingers plays
on the buttons that hang from the overhead crane,
and here at a bench where power surges
where are the hard hats and safety glasses
for the queued shadows of the next shift?

At the Cutting Edge

2011-08-15T19:40:00.003-05:00

The Foundry

2011-08-13T20:26:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The foundry sits on the site where Anson Phelps founded the original Ansonia Brass & Battery Co. At the center of the foundry the furnace rumbles. It's so large that its ducts and stacks disappear among the dark trusses of the foundry's roof, so large its hard to find a place to stand back and take it all in. It's a twisting, sculptural pile of ducts, pipes, wires, a tin dragon with the giant crucible at its center.

"Foundry"! I'd forgotten the origin of the word, from fundus, bottom or base. The founder was the one who gave the base metal its form and properties. He was the magic man who knew the spells and recipes and the Birmingham secrets, who summoned furious fires and tempered their burn, who charged the crucible, melted the charge and balanced the melt with alloys, and refined it to purge unwanted gases and who determined at last when the time was right for tapping. The founder was a magic man who toned and tuned the molecules and engineered machines and factories that turned base metal into wealth and power.

The great, Faustian beast still rumbles and roars, the fire in its belly kept hot by a few machinists and engineers with a supply of parts, grease and belts. The fire is reduced and the output of brass, a trickle. Looking closely around the rusting stacks and pipes, bins and tanks, someone with knowledge could read a furnace history in the alterations, adaptations and innovations, encrustations wrought by earlier generations to make founding foolproof. Abandoned machines sit idle and corroding, becoming fossils even as core operations churn slowly. It's the last of its kind, the end of a line. In it are the alchemists' secrets, though the alchemists themselves have moved on.

At the Crucible

2011-08-09T15:07:00.016-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The casting shop is a place of Stygian magnificence. Although the end of the shed is open to fresh air and daylight, inside the air is viscous and sooty, and one sees as if through cataracts into a tarred and dusted world that sucks up light and then suddenly sparkles and flares. Yesterday's image was shot here shortly after a truckload of scrap had been delivered. Along the edges of darkness they stacked gleaming bricks of discarded copper wire pressed tight the way unwanted cars are pressed tight at the auto junkyard. Wherever light caught the edges of the bricks they lit up like treasure chests.

The shed is extensive and lofty, and daylight glares from points on the far perimeter. It is strewn with dinosaurs of the brass industry's past, conveyors and compressors, tanks, pipes, and ducts, strange engines the size of cabins, rusted relics. Most appear to be in ruins, but along the back wall, as if from a great cave, this giant crucible still roars and glows. As Mike pushes a button the crucible tips, and molten copper flows into two molds. The molds are hard to make out as they drop into a pit below floor level where they are bathed in luminous water. It takes a long time for the molds to fill, but once they are loaded and gently cooled, Mike will hoist out two pillars of copper, fatter than telephone poles and glowing red.

The casting shed is a nasty place for taking pictures, with both too little and too much light. I put on my fastest lens, stop it all the way open, turn the ISO up to 1600 and try to squeeze out acceptable exposures at 1/80th of a second while dodging lens flare. I can't see to focus, and at f/1.8 focus should be precise. Sometimes I have trouble seeing the compositions through the viewfinder, and as I work my hands and gear turn black and buttery. It is a nasty place for taking pictures, and I keep going back for more.

Scrap

2011-08-08T08:33:00.003-05:00

A Gordian Knot

Worm-like,
wriggled free of earth,
in fact, mind's alchemy conjures them
to charge and channel the forms of mind,
but where did mind wriggle from, and
what are its boundaries?
Truly a can of worms!

Elegy

2011-08-04T18:13:00.006-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

I read Brent's email message late one Sunday evening, and I understood it was sent with the same spirit and urgency one gives to notes sharing news of the looming death of a dear, old friend. This note concerned a barn. It stood in the very center of the Great Hollow in Kent, Connecticut, and I had been exploring and photographing it with permission of the owner for several years. The barn was not especially old, but it looked massive, and even though it was not authentic (not even a real gambrel but a 1940's, hoop-less, barrel-like concoction), it completed the farmstead of an authentic 18th century farmhouse and was iconic New England. Though there were much older barns in the Great Hollow, no postcard would better proclaim the farm heritage of the place than one showing this farmstead.

Many times while shooting here I had walked the short ramp to the spot in the side where the barrel roof had been framed out to make a large door through which tractors and wagons once entered the barn. I had never dared to step inside. The floor was rotten. The space was dark and vast, and it took several visits before I noted a wooden structure, like a small silo near the back wall. Only then did I also find the narrow stair where the neighboring barn abutted, a stair which wound down to a passage and to what I took to be a cramped milking room. It must have been the height of modernity in the '40's when the complex was built. It had a well that seemed too narrow for cows. I would have loved to have seen how it worked. Grain was gravity fed from the previously mentioned bin in the hayloft above to several dispensers around the perimeter and above the milk room well. Locals occasionally recalled when this farm had filled the center of the hollow with cows.

I had, in fact, visited a few days before Brent's email and had noticed and photographed strange bulges in the roof, like the hemorrhaging of some internal organ beneath the skin of an animal or like a huge blister ready to pop. I had no idea then that the disease was fatal. When I finally got back a few days after Brent's email, I was too late.

Barns fail from the roof down, but it's usually the structural members that support the roof that rot and give way. This barn was all roof; the great barrel rested on the masonry of the lower level, dug into the hill and below ground; when the western two-thirds gave way it came down level with the ground. The world unwinds slowly, but sometimes the signature event is over so quickly nobody hears it fall or knows what's gone.

Daily Passages

2011-08-03T17:44:00.010-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Passages

Old faces
Attendant at the stoop.
Familiar handshake,
Full fist of cool brass
And the twitter of the hinges. -

The mind embraces them decades later;

And decades later,
There at the threshold,
Does the music also still resound,
Footfalls' echoes pad the hall?

School's Out

2011-08-01T17:43:00.004-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: As my photographic explorations among the hills of Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts carry me further from home I've often been surprised at the number of one room school houses that remain standing. Perhaps because I grew up in the city, I used to imagine these old structures to be relics of the 19th century, and I wondered how it could be that they remain standing.

Fortunately, some have historical markers from which I've learned that in rural areas within an hour or two of New York City one room schoolhouses were common into the 1940s, and it is in their nature that there were many; sometimes one every two or three miles, as the students who attended them lived within walking distance. They also survive because memories maintain them; those who were students there in the thirties and forties will sometimes do the bit of upkeep and lobby to restore them. On the Connecticut side of the border many have been accepted as cultural artifacts worthy of town funds and historic preservation. More often, on the New York side of the border they are lonely places that show their age and remind us how time slips insidiously by and how much we have changed.

NOTE: Special thanks to my friend Martin Kimmeldorf who has taken two of my photos and edited and combined them with images and words of his own. I recommend visiting his sites:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinsphotoart/5987675496/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinsphotoart/5992404393/in/photostream/

Sightseeing

2011-07-28T13:27:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL

EPILOGUE: My visit to Eastern State Penitentiary was brief. I spent the better part of two days photographing there, walking the abandoned passages, peering into decaying cells, looking for photographs. I was a visitor, an outsider, maybe an intruder. My only other encounter with a real prison was an architectural project many years ago that took me inside the Pittsburgh City Jail. It was still in operation, an apparently efficient place with real prisoners and guards and checkpoints, and I recall being struck by the disjunction between the functions of imprisonment and the refined, rusticated graciousness of H.H. Richardson's Victorian detailing and design. Even though I couldn't see the prisoners in their cells, the presence of real people beyond the bars made the architectural incongruity overpowering. It was the clash of incompatible worlds or of the facade of culture and the underbelly of expedience.

Eastern State Penitentiary's effect on me was quite different. It had opened 1829 and closed in 1970. It was 41 years since it held prisoners, since guards maintained strict security routines, since the cell blocks throbbed with the pulse of daily life. Whatever graciousness had been in the place had crumbled to brutality. At first I unconsciously expected to find the artifacts of the prison's 19th century residents, but the artifacts we found were left by the largely Black and Hispanic prisoners that were there when it closed, people I might pass in the street or meet today. In the public sections I blended with other tourists snapping vacation pictures into i-Phones. Had any been imprisoned here? Nostalgic return was unthinkable, or was that what the rest of us were doing?

I went from block to block, cell to cell looking for meaning behind the ruins and found the voices of 140 years of imprisonment merging like a chorus so that it was almost possible to forget that each cell held a real person, some good, some wicked, but all with similar yearnings: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Ultimately, however, the power of the experience rested on recalling that each ancient cell held a real person, that it had done so for 140 years, and that such institutions are everywhere and everywhere invisible.

Abandoned Concrete Factory, 2011

2011-07-23T15:54:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Our factories are empty and our prisons are full.

Cell Block Five

2011-07-21T20:15:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons are places set apart from time. Those who go to prison speak of losing so many years of their lives, and when they return to society, they often find society has moved beyond them and they are stuck in a different place, faded and decades apart.

Shaft

2011-07-19T20:18:00.003-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 9X9, rowed, stacked, and locked - so many cells, so many lives walled off. It is a place to learn what it means to be truly alone.

Final Cut or Close Shave

2011-07-17T16:52:00.000-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons of stone restrain the body; their boundaries are clear, fixed, easy to define. The mind's prisons entrap the spirit; their edges are shadowy, indeterminate, always menacing.

The Conk

2011-07-15T19:34:00.005-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: A prison is a community. It's nature is dependent on the interactions of individuals.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL 2: Freedom exists even where there is no liberty.

Bunk Beds

2011-07-14T21:09:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Count the number of prisoners and measure the size of society's failure. That failure reverberates through time in broken families, lost lives, defeat, poverty and desolation.

Underworld Overview

2011-07-12T19:14:00.006-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons are ideas, laws made stone, a foundation to support community and the Golden Rule, walls to make us trust, a blockhouse defense against the forces of entropy and madness.

Cell Block Fourteen

2011-07-10T12:04:00.010-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons open a path into crime. They are outposts of the underworld where breezes mingle with whispering secrets sharp as knives. They whistle along the edges of passageways, slip through stone, and nobody knows where they expire or who keeps tally of the honor of thieves.

NOTE: Those seeking a plan of Eastern State Penitentiary can find one here.

The Green Cell

2011-07-08T20:57:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons provide a path to redemption. A penitentiery is a special kind of prison designed for the penitence and reform of the prisoner. Here the prescribed treatment for lasting and deep contrition was prolonged, solitary confinement.

Cell Block Seven

2011-07-07T21:07:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons are ministers of punishment. They seek to console society and its victims by making those who caused suffering to suffer.

The Hub

2011-07-06T18:54:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons may keep us safe or terrorize us, but they are always about control.

Orbits

2011-07-05T19:23:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In prison, the wings of imagination are borne on the winds of escape, but waiting is the endless orbit of doing time.

Cell Block Twelve, Floor Three

2011-07-04T19:03:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Imprisonment is antithetical to freedom. Prisons measure the failure of a society to be free. Their walls are scarred with that failure.

From Outside Cell Block Eight

2011-07-03T12:58:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: We go to abandoned buildings to feel the past resonate in the present and to find out who we have become. The reverberations of an abandoned prison echo differently than other buildings. When a home, a hospital, a school, or a factory is abandoned it is usually a loss for a community with deep memories invested there. However, when a prison closes few mourn its passing, there is little nostalgia, and the memories are dispersed. Although the symbolism of prison is fundamental to society, most of us know prisons only from the outside and at a very great distance.

Guards' Window

2011-07-01T20:53:00.001-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I've been to The Pen. This is the place that originated the word, "penitentiary." I'm happy to say my trip was recreational. It makes a cosmos of difference. You can read about Eastern State Penitentiary here.

Moloch

2011-06-22T20:26:00.002-05:00

WILLIAM PAPE, Waterbury, 1918: "Our industries might be gathered into the grasp of giant corporations whose controlling spirits, destitute alike of local affiliations and decency of sentiment, would cold-bloodedly close down many factories on the ground that Waterbury was not a logical site for an industry."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: These turbines stand at the head of the factory shed where American Copper & Brass made pipe. The Naugatuck River, thirty of forty feet beyond the back wall, drove these turbines which animated machines the size of railroad cars and men by the train-load. The river has been unplugged. The trains are gone.

Factory Landscape

2011-06-19T21:33:00.010-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Interstate 84 heading east leaps from the western bluff of the Naugatuck Valley, and motorists find themselves looking down across the City of Waterbury from the top deck of a gangling, graceless structure known as, "the mixmaster," that spans the valley and connects I-84 with the city and the north-south highway.

Waterbury sits approximately half way up the Naugatuck Valley. It is the land of many rivers where the valley spreads out. It has always been too wet and rocky to farm, but mosquitos thrive. The local tribes called it Mattatuck, the land without trees, and wondered why white men would want to live there. The settlers called it, "Waterbury," and built mills on the rivers to manufacture buttons.

Through this window in the stair tower of an empty factory you could have watched Waterbury grow. Although the French Gothic towers and spires of St. Anne's and the French-Canadian community it served were probably there first, workers, some among them French-Canadian, probably stopped at this window to listen to the bells peal at the topping off ceremony when the dome was completed and the sanctuary finally occupied. That was shortly after World War I. It was the sort of day one might not even notice the smog.

Workers also probably stopped here around the start of World War II, when the smog was worse, to watch glaziers finish the shed roof over the pioneering, seamless pipe, production line going into service beneath. Some of them may have been baptized at St. Anne's, a church built with their parents' and grandparents' scrimped pennies.

French-Canadians were still working here in the 1950s when the new, double-barrelled, limited access "Route 8" carved its way up the valley, and in 1955 it's possible that workers entered here to salvage valuable equipment and documents from the factory as the city flooded and the copper tube production line was all under water. There's a sign in the shed to mark how high the water rose.

There were already fewer French-Canadians watching in 1971 when St. Anne's caught fire for the first time. It's said that after Interstate 84 set it's big footprints across the city, Waterbury was never quite the same, though at the time (1967) they envisioned a new city of gleaming, brass-trimmed towers.

The skies over Waterbury are clearer now. To those who drive Interstate 84 frequently, the spires of St. Anne's Church, shown here, the tall, slender tower of Union Station, and Holyland's cross on top of the eastern bluff of the Valley are familiar landmarks. Unless traffic is snarled, motorists have a two minute window on Waterbury and then it's gone. It's almost the blink of an eye.

Brass Mill Extrusion Press

2011-06-14T20:48:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When one steps into the past the air should be chalky and the sound disjunct, but here the wheels are still oiled and turning, and the steam is still hissing and purring softly. I watched a man hoist 20 foot lengths of copper tubing out of a bath of hydrochloric acid, the liquid cascading from the far end back into a long tub beneath. The bundle of tubes was then carried out of sight on a giant crane that straddled the building.

The enertia of great wheels keeps them spinning slowly, long after all other wheels have ceased. So it is here where a small amount of large diameter copper tubing is still made using technology put in place during World War II. No trains run here now, and only a few men work the floor. Beyond are other buildings of the complex, silent but for the haunting of pigeons, but its appropriate to start here where the music still plays in what is, as it were, a grand ballroom of another era.

The Naugatuck Line No. 2

2011-06-11T18:38:00.004-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Train Departing

The past is a cacophonous tumult
a maelstrom of melodies
some singing
some wailing
some marching defiantly.

A railroad coach abandoned half way up the Naugatuck Valley
it's ruined upholstery, a nesting place for rodents and small birds
the meaning of the train
the track
the valley
whiplash through time
factory gears flash
amassing brassy fortunes
sparking dreams
winning wars
grinding lives to ash
populating suburbs with 2-car families.
If not quite music, may it be chaos akin to the orchestra tuning up!
The black track along the river, where does it come from, where does it lead?

On the side of the coach a swastika has been spray-painted, an ancient tune.
Who put it there and when? How does it reverberate out of the valley's past? How does it partake of the Valley's bigotries and rivalries, its compromises and its compassion? Or is it the scornful howl of those who have come unhinged from history, beside the walls of Bedlam while the rest of us try to remember the past.