Piranesi's Garland

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Piranesi! Is he the father of all ruins photographers? Most people, if they know of him, know him by the images of Roman ruins that often adorn hotel rooms but are unfamiliar with his series of Prison images. To me he, his works, are kin not just of Goya's but of Escher's. Even his most sanctified Roman arches are teeming with raw nature beyond the few sprigs I can offer; in Piranesi there is no doubt, Nature conquers all. He would have had little patience with photographers’ qualms about compositing in a few extra sprigs when he could produce flights of imaginary arches springing through open air. What good is a camera if we can’t use it in heaven and hell!

It was a terrific shoot, the kind I like best: The western end of the row of stacks has acres of paved parking and nothing from blocking the sun’s light or to keep me from backing up. The lots were mostly empty, and there was a wide plane on which to move around, test ranges and angles interpose various elements of the mill architecture like props or toys that move when I move in relation to the stacks. Standing in some places there are pictures. I spent two hours with my tripod moving around within a six block square area while the sun was dropping, seeing what might be made at different angles trying to find the pictures before working my way to the arches and eventually getting close enough to discover the sprouting boscage. 

Because digital allows us to do anything, every print comes with the terror of the essentially blank canvas. Able to do anything, we must do something, and one explores and follows hunches or sometimes sees it all clearly. The previous two images offered one approach - a mood very much in sympathy with much Piranesi. Accordingly, I also tried to work in Piranesi’s style of the Roman ruins prints, with sepia toned paper and images of a certain inkiness fading suggestively at the edges. They were nothing more than terribly weak imitations of Piranesi. 

Meanwhile, I felt moved to  celebrate the fantasy and sandcastle-whimsy of these great steel sculptures and now offer them for the first time in living color. If you don’t know Piranesi, check him out on Wiki.

Bethlehem

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: 

Photographing Bethlehem

Built 

as best I can find out

for World War I

still soldier-like 

armored in rust and

industrial dusk 

tired husk of vanished empire

behind Roman arches 

that supplied legions 

back to the Civil War and 

the ra-ta-tat-tat of a

chain link fence and 

and two World Wars and

a lazy stream of visitors parked 

thinking about dinner 

before the sun sets

over Bethlehem.

Blast Furnace

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Normally my job is to take the ordinary and try to make it singular and representative. The five surviving blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel are already singular and iconic. Their looming presence has its own messages and my job is to find unexpected angles, revealing light, telling juxtapositions, to find ways to improvise upon the tune and transform it.

Be sure to click the image to view it large.

Mills - Bethlehem Steel

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  Bethlehem, PA, is not at all what I expected it would be. The buildings have the solemn venerability of survivors. They seem to have escaped the worst desecrations of gangs, street people and metal thieves common at other derelict mill sites. That’s all good because unique and awe inspiring treasures of American industrial architecture survive here, and buildings like those in my image survive as important context.

Time, however, is a less forgiving vandal. It has been 20 years since the mills closed, the roofs are ragged and frayed, so I was pleased to learn that property here has been set aside to become the, “National Museum of Industrial History,” a project in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institute. 

I wonder, will help come fast enough to preserve the context of generic mill buildings that sets off the unique architectural miracles? It will not come soon enough for anyone to notice the brass mills at this moment being scrapped in Brass Valley.

While I was at the Bethlehem mill an exhibit they were setting up was demonstrated as as a "photo op." A moderate sized crucible was suspended in a manner not quite visible, and an arch of glowing plastic was lit as if it were a stream of molten steel. At one point the museum guide put on a silver coat and went over, pushed a button to emit fake smoke, and stood as if pouring the faux metal. Less than a year ago I photographed Mike doing that job with real brass for the last time in Brass Valley. Now that would be something worth putting in a museum! Until a month ago the brass mill was still a living museum, the subject of my forthcoming book.

I sent out a dozen or so images from my recent trip as previews to a few friends and two people picked this image alone to comment on. One thought it was too generic and ordinary to be of interest. The other picked it as the favorite of the group and thought it had enough atmosphere to illustrate a Dickens novel. I’ll try neither to exalt nor brood. I had chosen it as today’s post before either comment was received. The value of receiving such comments is not as a graph of opinion to chase after taste, but as a window into what/how different people see. To me the photograph is a straight-forward, business-like composition to reflect on these venerable, business-like structures fading in time. 

Mrs. Number One (The Dressmaker's Daughters 17)

Rejoice! (The Dressmaker's Daughters 16)

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Enough to say that images exist to fill in the intermediate posts in the Daughters series, though I'll leave it to those who care to imagine what they might contain to lead us to this happy moment.

Needled (The Dressmaker's Daughters 11)

Headstrong (The Dressmaker's Daughters 10)

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Twenty-two mannequins and an opera house with large windows letting in filtered side light! 

How fluid the forms! How little it seems to require for these mannequins to spring to life with attitude and intent! How subtle the faceless cues of movement from which we intuit significance! Is it only the central figure whose presence is felt, or do all three come with distinct mental posture?

This is from a subset of the images that especially relies on the form and texture of the mannequins’ surfaces and that light. These images are extremely detailed. Even in these jpg reductions one can see most of the fabric’s weave and the stitching. However, on originals viewed 100% you will see beyond that to the wrapping of the fibers of the woven cloth. Such tiny details frequently cause moire patterns to appear when they fall in or out of phase with native screen dpi. They also seem to react strangely to various tools I use to control certain kinds of contrast adjustments, and there will probably be issues when I begin to print them. All of that only makes the more interesting to me.

Next time I go back, I want to get the camera even closer. How close can I get and still make them live?

Unstrung

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: 

No Electricity

Headbanger pumps

and enough gasoline

to empty hydraulic wells

and fluid basins

of a century of progress

half a century gone.

Silence and space

when they pause.

No heavy sounds,

sole-felt sounds,

bone-rap sounds, 

moving mass,

Immovable abutment.

No iron clank,

No clunk-

and-rumbling 

of unbundled tube.

No forlorn, whining

extrusion solo, soul-felt and whole.

Only headbanger’s return.

Rust Belt Dies

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  I’m drawn to the mottled, crisp surfaces, the planes of light and leading geometries and shadowed recesses in these piles of dies now lying about the extrusion mill. I’m not sure I can say much more about why, but I react to them as I do to the mannequins at the opera house, as pure form. These are too heavy to move much and too dirty, so I move about trying to fit my rectangle around them. It’s no different than shooting a landscape. Occasionally I’ll mutter, “That’s it!” And most often I won’t know why, but sometimes my eye will. 

Of course there are many excellent photographers with good reasons who will tall me, “No, not there. Here!” …and they will be right.  And my irksome brain will be worrying me, “Isn’t it too fussy in that notch on the top edge, and the top left corner feels weak. Worst of all, the exercise is of no consequence and of little if any importance to anyone but me. However, that quite misses the point.  Looking again later I think I know a bit about why this feels right while many other similar shots don’t work at all.

There are thousands of these dies, and they have been piling up at the old extrusion mill for more than a century. They were everywhere in metal shelves between the benches and in clusters and clearings wherever there was room. Most range in size from a stack of salad plates to a stack of generous platters, though some are as large a car tire, and all are solid steel and heavy. They fit the four draw benches and the expansion bench that formed the basis of the original tube mill that was probably here in the 1890s. Now they have been carefully piled into wire cages to accompany the benches to Mexico, and it’s feeling spacious between the benches.

The dies fit various machines similar to the one shown operating in a recently posted photo: http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2014/07/bench-23.html

You can see some as they sat in the working mill in these photos:
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2012/03/gallery-walk-talk-this-sunday-april-1st_29.html
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/06/brass-mill-no-1.html

Watercolors No.6

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  It is often color that has surprised me in the working factory. Unlike the silk mill where I’m drawn to try images in monochrome, in the active brass mill spots and splashes of color seem to make the best images. Even as it is being taken apart they draw my camera.

My vigil continues, and today it rained most of the time while I was there while men were removing hydraulic pumps from the top of the extruder. The end is getting nearer. 

Now that I’m at home, and the sun is coming out, and I’m “developing” a few of the images I took, I’m regretting not getting a longer lens or my boots from the back of my car to explore close-up possibilities here, but the rain never stopped until after I left, and the car felt a long way off. What will tomorrow bring?

Viewed small this image has the effect of seeming clotted or blurred, but at proper scale details are all clear and it's easy to read the caution sign on the red post, and all of the writing stenciled on the side of the yellow crane at the back of the image.

Earlier “Watercolors”: http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/search?q=Watercolors

The Dressmaker's Daughters 9

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:

Primers

What is scent before a nose smells vanilla?

What is flavor before a tongue tastes ham?

What are light and dark before retinae paint a multicolored picture to sit down in?

What are sound and echo before cochleae hear whistles and waves; songs and words?

And what is touch before skin feels itch, ache, sting and caress?

The world makes our senses and our senses spin a world of sensations in our brains.

From whence comes self that makes brain into mind?

And has taught us there are worlds for which we have no senses.

And what am I without a cosmos of others?

Therefore, We Exist!

Children of Electricity,

Life’s purpose? To thrive.

Wanted (The Dressmaker's Daughters 8)

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Special thanks to all who sent thoughts for titling yesterday’s daughter. So many things I learned from the titles sent me! I puzzled a long time over, “Segregation,” But I had learned something about my image after I’d thought about ti awhile. Other titles sent were:

"On the Hot Seat"

"Hot Stuff"

"Hotsy Totsy"

"Hot Child in the City"

"Old Fashioned Steam”

"Lady Lashes"

“Ensconced” and

“Wallflower"

I’ve tentatively titled the new Daughter 8 (above) “Wanted,” because that’s what the sign says, but I’m ready to discover new dimensions of my picture by seeing it through your eyes. Please feel free to send titles. However, unless you can zoom in close, you’re missing much of the fun. I did a horizontal version, but I miss the layers of window glass and the knotting of the shade pull or whatever the cord is for. This is where a tablet that flips sideways has an advantage.

Old Fashioned Steam (The Dressmaker's Daughters 7)

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I though t to title this, "Ego," but I decided to let viewers title it.