St. Anne's of the South End

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL & ANNOUNCEMENT: Today's Photo has been in hibernation while my attention has been on another project. All is well, and my thanks to those who wrote to inquire. It's good to know friends care. I'm pleased at last to be able to tell readers of this blog that I've signed a contract for the publication for my book currently titled Brass Valley: Made in America. The release is over a year away, but I will let readers of this blog know when release is imminent. 

The news is, however, bittersweet as I received word this week that the brass mill, closed since this past fall, will not reopen. This was the last of its kind, the last real remnant of old Brass Valley. After three years of photographing there regularly, I'd come to know the men who always tried to look out for me, help me understand and get my shots. I miss seeing them, and the book will be dedicated to John Barto, President of the firm who gave me freedom to shoot, and to the men who worked there and were my friends.

TODAY'S will continue to be intermittent as I give attention to finishing the manuscript, but this image marks the beginning of a new series on Waterbury that will NOT be part of the Brass Valley book.

Shroud Room or Composition in Blue and Brown

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  There is an odd corner at the Klotz Silk Mill that I don't recall seeing in any online photographs, in part because it is hidden until one swings open an awkward door. As everywhere, things have been left as they were on that day in 1957 when the mill ceased operations. Here, coarse cloth (cotton?) has been carefully hung for a purpose unknown. What was it used for?  There's nothing like it anywhere else in the mill. Here it sits, ready for use on a day that never came for a purpose forgotten.

I'd missed this spot until our last morning in the mill, and, frankly, if I had seen it earlier I would have judged it unpromising and moved on, perhaps wisely. However, by that last morning I had the leisure to take the challenge of an unlikely discovery. How to compose it and develop it so that it might at least hold ones eye? The room was tight; bright sunlight glared from behind the fabric but barely illuminated it. I thought, why would anyone take a picture here?

One of my shooting colleagues arrived in the room at the same moment but from another direction, and we each took turns shooting and trying to make something of our discovery. 

Toil

TONIGHT: SILK 'N STYLE

at the Housatonic Camera Club, 7 PM

Noble Horizons, Salisbury, CT

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:   

From lives of simple drudgery to lives of complex drudgery,

Autumn spreads a golden shroud to the tatters of our seasons.

Coequal

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created coequal, that they are endowed by their creator with similar inalienable rights. Among these are some life, liberty in that area over there and, after work is done, happy hour.

Plumbing

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  It was an outsized in-reach and all around it and in it was a claylike muck that adhered like cement. Once I had stepped into it, the damage was done and I was bound to cross the deepest section though it pulled at my hiking boot with every step. Two car tires half way up showed where a trailer had been enveloped by the machinery. I too was engulfed in industrial viscera. That was the phrase that crystalized the image, and from that point every decision: where I stood and shot in the goo, the lens I used scoop it, the exposures I set and the processing afterward were all determined by that phrase, "industrial viscera."

I received an article in my email today that suggested photography without a message is mere, empty "Aestheticism," and quotes Kant to prove it.

What is the difference between having a message and making something clear? As a photographer, I can't be too concerned with message beyond being properly respectful of others. The task is to find a place, a mountain top or a few cells of honeycomb or an old factory and select from it elements that make something clear of my experience of that place. How I transform the reflected light collected into a photograph is for me about clarifying that experience more than attending to literal appearances. How I process the image is dictated by the image and the feelings that attend it. I try more often than I succeed.

The article spoke about "ruins porn" prettifying rustbelt blight with little regard to those who live there and suffer, and it added a new term, "nature porn" to describe those eco-friendly calendars and the chain-emails that bring us steroidal nature and fill us with dreams of places secluded and wild.

In fact, isn't all art pornography teasing out feelings that we may submit to its will - to lose ourselves in a book or a symphony or a photograph. 

Garden of Delights No.9

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

Reason

Relatively speaking, 

moments are eons 

and mayflies grow wise 

in a mingy season, 

and realms there must be 

where time is slow 

while we pass as mayflies 

without reason.

Garden of Delights No.8

COLERIDGE:  "The albatross fell off and sank / Like lead into the sea."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Here's ample evidence life is cheap; climates shift with little regard to the living things that perish in the ebb and flow of eons. We have little enough understanding of the self-hoods of others of our species, much less the selfhoods of these insects cavorting then contorting then stilled.  I'm told they communicate with various faint buzzing noises and chemicals, as if there is no sorrow in their dying song as we comb the heavens for alien others with which to share space.

The only alternative to the world we have is the one we create.

Waterbury Starry Night

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Smoldered and moldy factories along the river's winding sheet 

where the railroad used to cross, and the brass mill used to hum,

and the slow march home along South Main of rattling vans and pickups,

and the wind in the hills and the flow of the river washing toward the sound.

NOTE: Double click images to enlarge. Details will become clear as the image is viewed on a larger scale. Here is a close-up view of an area in the center of the image:

Reschedule

Silk 'n Style

by Emery Roth II

with Rick Pauline and Dawn Dingee

discussion & presentation

The Klotz Throwing Mill in Lonaconing, Maryland, is an accidentally preserved, "gilded age" silk mill from the beginning of the 20th century. View it through the eyes of eight photographers who traveled there in two groups in the past year. See the machinery and factory where the dreams of the gilded age were spun.  Consider how different eyes convert the experience of the mill into still images, learn about the region, and join a discussion as we consider whether Style matters.

WHEN: Tuesday, January 21, 2014, 7:00 PM

WHERE: The Housatonic Camera Club

Noble Horizons, 17 Cobble Road, Salisbury, CT

Garden of Delights No. 7

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: While photographers are still behind  the shutter there are already so many issues and opportunities to consider that many of us prefer to concentrate our efforts there. The deluge of digital options may seem as if it will drown us if we let too much in. ...or in it we may find new expressive possibilities that exist between photo-reality and graphic possibility. My own experience is that digital experimentation only expands expressive possibilities and enhances the pleasure I take in developing an image.

In chemical photography "solarization" is a phenomenon (to my knowledge B&W only) caused by extreme over-exposure; some tones reverse themselves. Although I've never done it, with practice and craft chemical photographers learns to produce and control the effect. Man Ray was famous for doing this. Before I began using ColorEfexPro plug-in for Photoshop, my experience was that digital solarization was a special effects filter with no nuance.  It was either on or off. A friend of mine called it "the Man Ray effect."

A number of images on this blog were made with the ColorEfex solarization filter. It provides several different ways to control the finished appearance, including a slider which sets the transition points where tones reverse and one which seems to change algorithms underlying the effect. The filter extends solarization into color photography in which colors reverse to their complement. While using the software the image changes continually with the sliders, and with a bit of experience one can learn to control the sliders to explore what the image is capable of - see the different events that happen as the "elapsed time" slider reveals and conceals detail. Often the experiments produce a variety of novelties, all with interest, or better yet, all strung into a movie they become the over-familiar, sci-fi journey through some other dimension. Occasionally the sliders bring something into focus that seems surprising and worth keeping, and with patience one can tune it in.  Or maybe there's nothing there at all. As I said in the first post, this is all experimental, and I'm eager for reactions.

For this image, the first step of the process was simply to intensify whatever color was in the image and concentrate contrasts using TopazAdjust. Solarization will burn away a good part of the saturated color, and what is left can be adjusted to reveal details that would otherwise be partly hidden.

Garden of Delights No, 6

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  The series was begun in 2010 and I've always found it an excellent place to engage the fullest range of processing options. The divide between photography and digital art is a vague one. I am equally interested in the digital development of the image as in the process of exposure to light. 

Digital photography has revolutionized photographic development as much as launching satellites into space changed flight. That places no obligation on photographers to go digital, nor once working in digital are we obligated to push processing beyond convention, but it seems anachronistic to me to work in digital and limit exploration of developing to digital simulations of chemical techniques. 

The photographs in this series are a place for me to experiment with and explore a wide range of processing options. I want to push and test limits. I hope viewers will feel free to pass along their reactions.  Whether good or bad, I'm interested in where, if anywhere, they take you.

Earlier posted pictures in the series can be found by typing "Garden of Delights" in the search box above.

The Corn is as Cold as the Temperature Goes

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Too cold to go out and make photographs, and the saturated soil freezes well below the root line. Moles and voles and things in warm holes are sleeping in.  Me too.

Ego

Resolution

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  The series is Footsteps. Are some of them yours?  Some of the images were shot and processed as far back as 2011 and left to accumulate. My intent has been to post them with no comment beyond the title.

Springtime

Hypothesis

Wherewithal

Retrospection

Articulation

A very happy holiday to all.

Digression

Footsteps

Bottom of the Shaft

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Factory Lift Part II

I'd like to be the guy that unwinds time.

He sits above the stars and sees time fall

like a blizzard sweeping across an empty plain.

or sifted flour to raise daily bread.

It's only pulleys and weights, that's all it is.

a trick of leverage, tomorrows and yesterdays.

YOU ARE INVITED TO:

Silk 'n Style

by Emery Roth II

with Rick Pauline and Dawn Dingee

discussion & presentation

The Klotz Throwing Mill in Lonaconing, Maryland, is an accidentally preserved, "gilded age" silk mill from the beginning of the 20th century. View it through the eyes of eight photographers who traveled there in two groups in the past year. Consider how different eyes convert the experience of the mill into still images, learn about the region, and join a discussion as we consider whether Style matters.

WHEN: Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 7:00 PM

WHERE: The Housatonic Camera Club

Noble Horizons, 17 Cobble Road, Salisbury, CT

Silkiness

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

Orchid Lust

Silk is slippery.

It murmurs in 

plush, Victorian syllables

that shimmer like gossamer.

Swaddled in purple velvet's 

downy cushion 

we remember that silkiness begins in the guise of a moth 

or a burrowing worm or tentacled arachnids, poised and still.

Skeletons in the Closet

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In a world of Victorian spindles and knobs, gears and sprockets, these pressure cookers look out of place, and, in fact, I've seen no other photographs of them despite the number of photographers that have passed here. Why is that?

They might be Gothic instruments of torture in a Victorian silk mill mystery, Holmes arriving before the pressure meter that runs from minus 30 through plus 60 has fully reset to an ambiguous zero, and only he knows if the sad victim was steamed like a lobster or slowly depressurized.

How did these serve the more acceptable aims of the silk barons?  Did they set the dyes, or did they shrink and tighten the silk fibers the way the annealer uses moist heat to repair the crystal structure in stressed brass? How little I know about the ways of raw silk! Where would we need to look to find someone who would know how to use this equipment today? The rust and stillness of the mill beg the question.

Factory Lift

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Factory Lift

I'm not sure I ever noticed how 

much elevators are a lot like clocks.

Pulleys and weights, that's all they are, 

and the right grease to make them glide. 

One is set to lift a load. 

The other leverages our hours. 

Ours,

if we can buy them back 

at the end of the haul. 

Four hours in two shifts plus food stamps. 

Of course, we can always use the stairs. 

I'd like to be the guy that drives the elevator, 

propped on his stool, floor numbers in his head, 

with his wrist twisted around the handle that levitates us. 

He knows to within 30 trips 

plus or minus 

how many trips he makes each week, 

and figuring market cycles roughly, 

he can tell you how many trips he will have to make 

'til his last ride in twenty-three years, 

so many months, weeks, days hence. 

He's steady, and he never uses the stairs.

Gilded Age Gilding

PHOTGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I think Charlie was the first to put the shoes by the chair, maybe the umbrella as well, but there are always new still-life set-ups appearing here. As I got to the top of the stair, Charlie's still life was in front of me, though Charlie was gone. He appeared as I began to play with the elements he had left, rearranging them to make use of what I liked in the excellent southwest light. Rick and others followed later as we all selected from three floors of silk mill factory that had become a time-capsule sealed in July of 1957 and only recently opened. Time stopped here, and we had come to photograph it and compose it and process it into finished images.

Bespindled and Bebobbined

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Snapshot

It is a silken circus

bespindled and bebobbined

of Victorian, industrial clatter.

to capture the whole, 3-ring show-

silken filament streaking

bobbins bobbing,

flywheels winging,

and the steam calliope!

and to also eyeball every sprocket,

savor the nattering and shuttling

of the tiniest cog

in the unbroken linkage

between initial cause

intermediate event

and ultimate purpose,

and to show it in a photograph.

Something of their World

"Work benches, tables, and chests of drawers are stocked with sundry medicines like eyewash, mercurochrome, and spirits of ammonia. Even the workers' toilets suggest something of their world: eight stalls shared two rolls of paper, mounted on the outside. Faded, gaudy, umbrellas are tucked everywhere and women's shoes—perhaps thirty pair-—are hung on spindles and tossed into tag bins. They are all early fifties style, with pointed toes, chunky heels, and well-creased insteps, thrown aside by workers after eight or more hours of moving up and down the mill aisles. What took place here?" 

from The Klotz Throwing Company in Lonaconing: Opening Tut's Tomb by Rebecca M. Trussell

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The bathroom was excessively dark, almost beyond shooting. For that reason, I dismissed it when I discovered it late on my first visit. However the rusty doors were interesting, and with time now, I decided to try to make something of them.  There  was a grungy beauty about the place, but it was an awkward space to shoot, and in the end, it was just a bathroom.  

To catch a shot that added context, I squeezed into the corner of the room, my unfolded tripod creasing me into the corner while I tried not to think about what I was squeezing into. This was the second floor on the leaky corner of the building. The roof was failing just here above the third floor. While shooting I used a flashlight to paint a bit of additional light.

The shot speaks well to the quotation.  Whether it has anything of its own to add to the conversation, I'm unsure.

September, 1957

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Klotz Throwing Mill closed by a strike officially on Jul 7 1957, though the calendar in the photograph says September. The sweater has hung so long it comes away in the shape of the chair. And the silken thread produced here winds backward through Gilded Age parlors and underthings to New York silk barons who sited their mills here where coal, transportation and labor were all cheap, and the mills were like schoolrooms where the wives and daughters of miners worked in silence to the clattering machines, and when it was time for break, the lights were turned off to save electricity.

for a complete description read Rebecca Trussel's excellent article, "Opening Tut's Tomb."

Corn Light

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I'm thankful my family and I are all well and that the nation is not at war in Syria and that frequently hostile nations are talking. May the talks lead to a harvest of good will and peace and an end to world hunger.

*click to enlarge

Plume & Atwood Dam

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  What value could these old mill buildings possibly have? Friday's Waterbury Republican-American carried the news of their demolition.  A link at the end of this note connects to a short slide show of the demolition and some notes about the site's history.

The buildings, in Thomaston, were built before the Civil War by Seth Thomas for his clock company. Seth Thomas was a joiner and a pioneer manufacturer of wooden clocks. Affordable clocks were changing time, and by the 1850s the times demanded clocks of metal. My understanding is that the key building of the new site was a rolling mill to roll brass for Seth Thomas clocks.

The buildings had been decaying for years. One had fallen before I began photographing here, and another fell at the beginning of the summer. The end had been coming for many years.

I'm not privy to the plans for the site where the buildings stood, and there may be a wonderful vision I'll welcome, but I'm mindful of Henry James warning that it takes a lot of history to make a little tradition, and I'm aware that every brick in this old factory carried the measure of a bricklayer's hand. 

Places that connect the region to our Brass Valley past are quickly becoming as scarce  as ironworks in the hill towns. This mill, situated next to the Naugatuck Railroad Museum and with access to a beautiful riverfront and nearly adjacent to Thomaston restaurants, seems to me to be an opportunity sadly missed at the picturesque, historic mill town with the distinctive towers.

http://www.rep-am.com/news/local/766944.txt

Tones of Gray

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Urban canyon, lacework of silk, tiny spinners ignorant of spindles and photographers cautiously preserving dust.

No Springs

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What does silk weigh? Unlike most cloth which is sold by the yard, silk is bought and sold by the pound. The silk worm which secretes the thread also secretes a gummy substance which helps to bind the cocoon in place. The manufacturers who buy the raw silk must remove this paste in order to make silken thread from which fabric will be woven. They paid for the gum discarded, and they viewed the loss in weight as lost profit.  In order to recoup that loss, manufacturers took to soaking the raw silk in metallic salts of tin, iron, or lead. These readily bonded with the silk and returned the lost weight and sometimes more.  However, the salts also caused the silk to wear badly and become brittle in time. 

Even without silk manufacturers weighting their product, the weight of silk changes significantly with humidity so product weight was always somewhat subjective. Of course, in a business based upon the weight of the product, it's not a surprise to find a precision scale such as this just outside Shipping & Receiving to assure weights are accurate and profits are maximized.

In the Shipping Dept. Dreaming of Vermeer

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The painter methodically fills empty space with shapes and colors to touch truths truer than facts. The poet strings his poem with choice words, one at a time until it is filled with music that sings beyond language. The dancer moves, fills the stage with gesture and the body's song; muscles arch, stretch or spiral like a star. Arms, legs, torsos saturate the air with a primal beat. 

The photographer doesn't fill anything, he plucks with his lens shards of light and shadows cast, and he fixes them with a click.  It's a short time in which to fill eternity.