Nameless

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Break Time

In the whoosh 

of the closer 

opening,

bathroom secrets

hushed.

To be told later.

Paper Trail

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

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

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

Accounting

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

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

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

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

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Picnic by the millpond, 1968,

the girl, the car, the moon!

Lathe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.