Thrill Ride

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Of the sacred trilogy of amusement park rides, it was always the roller coaster that separated the fearless men from the whimpering boys, and I didn’t dare to ride one until I was shamed onto it by a girl. We had just finished 9th grade, had been dating for a month, and I was looking forward to the summer ahead. Rye's Dragon Coaster was famous, built in 1929 at the height of the Golden Age of roller coasters, but we were there with another couple and cared little for history. 

Without anyone suggesting it, we were online to ride the Dragon, as if riding the Dragon was a thing assumed. Though nothing was said, she forced me onto the ride as surely as if I had been at knifepoint. As we inched toward the wooden turnstile and the man taking tickets, I saw a catastrophe waiting to happen. My friends were already talking about going back a second and third time and checking how many rides we had tickets for. How could I admit to being a roller-coaster virgin!  I had long ago outgrown the height line, and there was no manly way to retreat from my dread. A moment before the man took my tickets I imagined the worst, and I realized that the option of not following my girlfriend through the turnstile was worse than getting on the coaster and puking all over her. 

After that, I remember the clenching: Me clenching the restraining bar in front of us, and her clenching my forearm and then sliding over the top and into the first speeding dip where she pressed her cheek hard against the muscle in my arm, and I tried to hold the mass of our bodies down in the seat that was spinning us around the first turn. I won’t say what happened when we entered the dragon, nor could I explain the sensation of the slow final bend and rolling to a stop, except to say that I continued moving many minutes after.

I know the Dragon Coaster is nothing compared to thrill rides today. Still, at the end of the ride I stepped off shakily and managed not to pass out, and though I’ve been back again since, even again that evening, and I’ve bravely led my family onto a roller coaster at Disney World so they would never have to risk my humiliation, I’m happy to have reached an age when I need no longer ride the Dragon Coaster. It is a thrill accomplished.

NOTE: The photo shows the roller coaster at Wildwood, NJ.

The Longest

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Boardwalks! They so naturally lend themselves to metaphor. Were these along the Jersey Shore the first? Patched together relics, paths to democracy that sprouted along the Atlantic shores as new wealth and railroads opened a new frontier of leisure? Places still where battles are occasionally waged. This one in Wildwood, though I have never seen it before, seems a place forever changing its face and ever the same. Railroads made the Jersey shore the place to be, and everybody knew the right place to meet the right sort of people.

How to photograph it remains a work in progress.

Photographing Wildwood

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: We checked the weather forecast carefully before embarking: Monday, cloudy chance of rain; Tuesday, rain likely; Wednesday, partly cloudy chance of rain. Temperatures, 40s to 50s. The trip was on. A perfect December stretch to photograph old boardwalks on the Jersey Shore! Would anything be left after the repeated wooing and betrayal of generations of tourists and the savaging of storms? Our mission was to capture what came our way.

We came from opposite directions and met in Wildwood where land struggles to stay above water. Wildwood is a grid; street after identical street of bland white houses, empty motels and fenced off parking lots. It is a ghost town in December, but The Candlelight Inn was an oasis of Victorian fine frumpery, and we, it’s only guests, were welcomed warmly. Even without steady guests, everything was dusted immaculately, glassware glistened, paneling darkly glowed. 

I meant to photograph the dining room. But for electrification of beautiful glass fixtures it was as it might have been in 1890. We managed to make time for an excellent breakfast in that room. The owners told us they had bought the house intact, and my understanding was that it had been that way through several long tenures. We might well have spent time photographing inside the B&B, but we didn’t.

Boxcar Barn

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: This barn along a road behind the train station in Wingdale, NY, seems “home-made,” but tile silos were expensive things. Once set in place, they were never moved. I’ve never seen any so short or so dashingly coiff’d. There must be a story to explain this.

Lofty

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Among things to notice while dallying in the past is the care taken to utilize height. Bank barns, railroad loading structures, steamship docks all are built to use the economics of height. Earlier I posted photographs of Coal Pier 18, a multi-acre structure at a key coal transfer point to turn train-loads to barges-full. The recently photographed American Brass monorail is another example.

Physics defines Work as the amount of the force applied to move a mass across a distance. A falling mass was work saved or conserved; it was money banked. How did gasoline engines and powerful electric motors, which made energy always the click of a switch away, change the economics of structures like this? 

Designed by someone and carefully built by hand, who was he? Was this a unique construction or were these plans used widely?

We passed this along the road after leaving Pennhurst. I’m not even certain what it held. I recall we walked around it, figured out how it worked, saw where the rail line ran, but at seven months’ remove, I can’t recall what the shadowed side looked like.  I wish I had a photo!

It's hard for communities along the endless corridors of strip malls and super highways to reclaim a distinct identity. How much is it worth to have structures like this stabilized and preserved for future generations to wonder at as they try to understand a world that was, to which they are the heirs? Would it help if we called this sculpture?

Pennhurst Past

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: 

A central corridor lined with rooms, 

each room a yesterday, beds lining 

walls the color of watery pea soup, 

the smell of amnesia in the still air, 

and pillows full of memory, forgotten.

Horizons

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  Most people are interested in what’s beyond the horizon; photographers are more interested in exploring how it lies and what’s above it  and under it and how all the tones balance and clash. 

May everyone find friendship and appreciation at the Thanksgiving table. This photo by request but sans snow. My apologies for the omission.

Pillow Space, Pennhurst

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Looking at this image shot at Pennhurst made me think about times when I was five or six in my new bedroom - nap times, maybe, when I would lie awake in that space between the pillow and the wall and entertain myself. It was, perhaps the most private place I had. There were already cars and trains and boats and planes on the wallpaper there, and nobody minded if I added suns and moons and rode Crayon palominos through the milky way.

Exterior Pennhurst

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:   The thriving tree supports all branches down to the most fragile twig with vital nutrients. 

'Tween

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Back in April I visited Pennhurst State School and Hospital, commonly known as Pennhurst Assylum. I posted 6 photos then (click & scroll to mid-page). I had more photos to post at the time, but I chose to move on because the images became too dark to post, or at least too dark to post day after day after day. It’s a fair question to ask, “Why post at all?”

I have good friends, supportive of my photography who cheer me on when images are sunny but try to pass dark subjects by, and occasionally someone who knows me less well will ask in kindness, “Is everything OK?" One only has to look at the state of the world to know everything is not OK, but I’m fine, and thank you. We follow the news in order to understand and to remain compassionate, and we continue to function normally, even when we are helpless to know how to fix the world. My natural buoyancy lets me use my camera to explore the past that lies around me, a time traveler lingering in another age to try and understand where we came from and to grasp hold of the metamorphosis that is existence. I like things lost or abandoned and anything with a coating of dust or rust, peeling paint or the patina of age. I’ve been attracted to dried up beetles and festering water lilies, things we have been or are made from or might become. It’s sometimes a graveyard shift and well suited to my dullness or my sanguinity.

I went to Pennhurst largely ignorant of its special history but interested to find out what it had to teach me about a very different kind of human condition. When I came into this space what struck me immediately were the walls, flat metal panels rusted to the color of puke, the blankness of them and the lack of horizon. Even where there were windows, they were small breaks in the flatness of the walls. There were some wheelchairs and beds on wheels with rails to keep people from rolling out, and some walkers. I placed one of the walkers where the panels made an intersection and began composing images.

There are many things one may think at such a crossroad, the worst must be to think you are alone, forgotten by the living and the dead.

Rhinecliff Tower

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Today we went in search of John Bird and his church and found neither.  At the four corners of Mulberry and Livingston there were four beautiful old wood frame houses with plenty of Victorian trimming, but there never was a church. We found a church by John Bird, but it had no brick.  And so, here’s one more photo of Rhinecliff while I try to track down John Bird and his brickwork.

Rhinecliff Autumn

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Stone steps that tumble like a woodland stream to greet dream visitors ushered through Miss Jones’ magical doorway to the castle within. Even in its current state, these brick decorations are trumpet flourishes. Since posting yesterday I’ve learned that a master mason, John Bird, was responsible for the brickwork of Rhinecliff as well as for the church at the corner of Livingston and Mulberry ten years later. 

The old town history records the building of a church, “under the direction of Father Scully, in 1864, with George Veitch as architect, and John Bird as master mason.” It goes on to list the names of large contributors to the church parish: "Mrs. Mary R. Miller, Mrs. Franklin Delano, Miss Elizabeth Jones, Mr. Horatio Miller, Mr. Edward Jones, Mr. William Astor, and Mr. Lewis Livingston.” - a church for Miss Elizabeth and the people who kept up with her and probably passed through this door regularly. I look forward to finding out how John Bird's imagination met the commission for a church.

In the meantime, it’s worth noting that the decorations appear to be mostly composed of standard shape bricks, but with a precise technique for cutting brick to meet immediate conditions. Each point on the sunburst arches is uniquely shaped, no two points are alike. This is a building ahead of its time, designed and executed before there was a demand for brick shaped into a variety of curves and a complement of precast decorative details. 

There is an excellent collection of documents on Rhinecliff and including a plan, here: http://loc.gov/pictures/item/ny0191/ at the Library of Congress.

The best collection of early photos I’ve found is here: (http://www.historic-structures.com/ny/rhinebeck/wyndcliffe.php). Be sure to click through the different sets of pictures. Much of the porch (All of it on the left side) is gone now, and we see directly to the second layer of brickwork. Among the interiors is a shot looking into the central hall that is a similar view to mine where the floor was gone (http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2014/11/rhinecliff-open-house.html). 

When you’re done looking elsewhere, come back to this picture; open it up to full screen if you can, and turn down any light around the screen or reflecting from it. Look until you’ve convinced yourself there’s nobody lurking behind the window or about to come through the opening door. Can you find Miss Elizabeth in a mansion's folly, or John Bird?

Toccata in Brick

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Although the architect of Rhinecliff remains uncertain, whoever it was could call on the services of virtuoso masons to execute a needlepoint sampler of masonry forms, patterns, and decorations to bedazzle visitors. Nobody piled brick like the Joneses. Expand the image to the width of your screen, and slowly scroll from bottom to top as if you had stopped and slowly let your eyes climb the walls in front of you and then walked by.

Rhinecliff Open House

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  I’d like to invite you across the floor to the room where everyone’s socializing, but as you see, there is no floor and the food’s probably overstored. Resist the urge to look around through that door to see how the table is set or the entertainment is arrayed in the back of the room. Imagine dancing here at the housewarming in 1853. Imagine the music playing, echoing across the Hudson.

Rhinecliff on Hudson

To learn more about Edith Wharton’s Rhinecliff, click here. 

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: “Wyndclyffe,” its actual name, was built in 1853 high on a bluff to command the view, and green lawns and gardens stretched to the river. It set a mark, and everyone tried to keep up with the Joneses.

Twin Stoops

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: On traveling in time

My friend took me here where paths no longer lead, and the stoops grow slippery with moss.

Inside, a stringless piano, gospel hymns forgotten, where once there was song.

Watercolors No.7

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Here is an October moment that composed a pond beside a friend’s cabin in Virginia. It has waited since 2012 for its moment on the blog. 

To see more of the “Watercolors” series, type, "watercolors" into the box in the upper left.

Autumn Colors

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  

Cider time

Leaves will crumble 

Galaxies dissolve 

Factory Flag

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Yesterday's flagpole image was composed on a melancholy walk around the empty campus of American Brass / Anaconda. The empty flagpole begs numerous questions at what they say was once the largest, busiest brass manufacturing plant in the world, a place where the American Dream was designed, assembled, and tested.  

Until I walked up Liberty Street, I never realized the company had a flagpole, though I’ve long been aware of the immense part this factory and the Valley played during both world wars. In the four years I photographed here I don’t think I ever saw a flag flying; the administration had already moved out, so the flagpole was positioned facing a locked gate. 

Of course the men carrying out the final shut-down of the brass mill remember when the flag was raised and lowered daily, and they can name the men who did it, but even they have no knowledge of this mysterious memorial in the long-closed rod mill. Who placed the flag and when? - here in a west-facing window of one of the great basilicas of Brass Valley. What special resonances does it gather here? What is the music playing?

Flagpole 1

Engagement

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I bring to every photograph I take, the experience of the taking of it. That experience must either find expression in the composition, exposure, and processing of the image, or be lost to others. Does it matter? Would this image be any different with studio lights and a few dusty props? Yet for me this set of images remains tied to shadows in the rugged engineer’s office, a quarter century abandoned, sacked and quiet while the afternoon sun slants through broken skylights high in the work shed roof and through the window, from which the engineer sometimes looked down on production below, or sat at his desk where the sunbeam falls on the old cart where the gears were left after everything else had been looted. 

Inclination

Ritual of Sunshine

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  It’s hard to know what went on here, and without presses or paint hoods or ovens to distinguish one space from another, it was often difficult to know where I was. Of course every building, floor, and column, though nearly identical to its neighbors, is carefully numbered. Passing from room to room, floor to floor I kept track of my place on a mental grid in a space that might as well have been endless in all directions until I hit the cellar below the sub-basement or the roof or the last hall.  

Station Unknown

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I’ve asked all the old-timers. Nobody can tell me anything about the flag and the board beneath it, with twelve similar calendar photos of antique automobiles. It is just beside the loading bay where a tractor-trailor truck has been parked and left since 2008, when the rod mill closed. Exploding pinholes of light bore through window cracks and burn out grimy surfaces, but a sharp military crease remains in the flag, and I imagine a bugle’s call. Whatever the occasion and the dear memories that prompted such tribute, it reverberates in many dimensions here in the brass mill.

Annealer's Station

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Eight years closed - still not tea time…

Basilicas and Passages, Autumn

Nevermore at the Opera House

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  All the leaves are yellow and orange and red and brown and the raven has perched in the top balcony of the Sterling Opera House to await the phantom.

Numbering Station No. 2

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: 

Becoming and Going

There are basilicas 

and passages 

first and last. 

Between 

there are stations in bays, 

properly equipped, that come, 

and the people 

that come 

and go 

and the power 

to make it all move 

and a river of raw material 

becoming and going.

Empty Stations

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: For a long time when I shot here in the rod mill, the existence of the long passageway with the monorail, that runs above the bay on the right, remained hidden. Switch back and forth between the previous image and this one, and you’ll understand how things are. The spot where the skylight is interrupted in the bay on the left is where the pedestrian bridge passes over the roof. The monorail crossed further down.

They say that cranes, the avian kind, are very expressive, and those that are left have a very large vocabulary of vocalizations; in certain seasons, I’ve been told, they even sing to each other. These cranes are silent. Some avian cranes also communicate by color changes and through a large vocabulary of non-vocalized communications. I think sometimes when I’m facing the other way these cranes turn slightly and lower their hooks a bit, and I turn in time to see a cat darting into a shadow. Though these cranes rarely whoop, they are endangered. That’s the way things are.

Parked

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  Even after I found the long hall to the pedestrian bridge across the track (previous entry), I took no notice of this hulking piece of machinery parked in the only alcove. There are numerous lessons in that:

1.  Sometimes I see only what I’m looking for. I didn’t visit this hall often, but I must have passed the alcove a half dozen times. It is one of the few features in a very long space, and yet it made little impression on me until Corky happened to tell me the factory once had a monorail system, and I began looking for its remains. Lazlo had missed it too, but when I pointed it out, he gave it his super panorama treatment, while I took out my wide-angle lens. There’s never a shortage of things to see or ways of seeing them.

2.  I don’t usually photograph “things.” However, until I understood that the beam was a track and the car, a monorail vehicle, I was mindless and saw no picture here. The picture lies in the purpose - in the thought of that thing impelled along the track, perhaps with hampers of scrap metal hanging from it, perhaps a workmen walking next to it. Until I knew what it was, I saw no picture. However, the picture must speak without any explanation. It’s not a photograph of a thing; it’s an image.

3. If there is power in the image, visual should precede verbal, and the power will lie in realms unstated.

For the record:

The "long perpendicular hall” remains a bit of a mystery; why so long? It continues behind me and well past both bridges to where the building once ended and where other structures might once have stood. In any case, like the pedestrian passage, this alcove once went across the roof of the rod shop and then entered an enclosed bridge over the track to the flat wire mill. Of course, I’m not sure what the mills were doing when the monorail was in operation. The bridge is gone, this end walled over, and on the other end the buildings are much changed, though its easy to see how the bridge and monorail might have fit in. 

The monorail began there, in the flat wire mill.  Passing into the rod mill and turning here, it zigged down at the far end to the right, and then zagged left out of the building. It then crossed in front of the powerhouse to the foundry. Gables remain high on the roofs where it entered each building, and I think I can see it in the 1921 and 1934 aerials. 

Inside the foundry it made another turn left and crossed back over the tracks through one of the bridges pictured earlier.  That bridge must have been similar to the missing bridge of this picture. Inside the extrusion mill you can barely see where the bridge abuts, but it is at a spot where trains and trucks had access. 

A bridge, two gables, and this stretch of track where the "monorail" vehicle came to rest are all that is left of a system that once was a major artery for materials and people and the flow of product. What, exactly, it did, I don’t know, but I never realized how much this campus was once like a single, big, humming machine, back before reality was digitized.

Pedestrian Passages

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: What is it about such passages that draw me in, that tease the child inside many of us? I remember the day we discovered the other entrance to this bridge across the track. It was one of our first explorations of the American Brass flat-wire mill. I noted the condition of the bridge decking, and my better judgement decided that it was enough to look through the dirty glass of the locked door and not risk crossing the track, but the hunt had begun for the other side. 

Had I crossed the bridge then I would have been totally lost, and it took more than a year of searching before I found my way to the end above the rod mill. It was not where I had expected it to be. The trick is that this is not the bridge but a passage across the rooftop to the edge of this building. The track and bridge are just beyond the door, and the existence of the long, perpendicular hall in which I stood to take this picture, that runs for hundreds of feet to my right and left, was unknown. The only access is a small stair leading from the second story men's locker room. Old plastic sheeting blocked the way and made it look especially uninviting, and it was a long walk from the bridge entrance I was trying to locate.

So what factory function warranted the expense of building a bridge over the track to a long room, one bay wide and only accessible by a narrow bridge or three flights of stairs at the far end?

Passages

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Back before reality became digital, before stuff that mattered had turned to LEDs on a FedEx map tweeted and twittered at the speed of light, before Amazon orders were beamed to us in a day, we used to value physical connection. What mattered was, literally, weighty. Strong backs and heavy machinery were needed to lift and move such weighty matter. This may be the rustiest corridor in Brass Valley. Lazlo and I have now photographed in all of the industrial buildings along this stretch of rail and nudged our lenses even into some of the corners that time has forgotten. 

Of those bridges over rails that were once essential to the efficiency of industry, what child isn’t intrigued to know what passes through them and where they lead! Modern factories are thrown up in a moment; they are like beetles with huge tin shells enclosing lots of hollow space, but these companies grew slowly, adding workshops and basilicas as needed; they hugged the rail corridor, crowding and climbing over each other as if to get a better view of the locomotives' smoke and steam and soot. Every bridge implies some network of passages that wind like intestines within the tumble of factory sheds to network stations and functions and offices. Footsteps passing through real passages made product move as smoothly as the even hum of well-greased wheels and pistons and gears, and I’ve found both inside these bridges.

We’ve visited all that cross over the track here, as close as one may safely get, photographed some. The red one at the far back is broad and high and it connects two large machine shops where heavy industrial parts are still being finished for various industrial machines made elsewhere. There is space to drive a fork lift, and support for a heavy load over that bridge. The one in the center is the longest and most mysterious, passing across rooftops from interior sheds so as to to reach across the track to a tall derelict structure of corrugated metal. The nearest bridge was not for people. It was part of a “monorail system,” that linked a rod mill a wire mill and a tube extrusion mill to the central foundry. 

Six bridges appear crossing the tracks in the 1921 view of this area. Continuing in order, the next was all electrical connections: tubes and wires; one carried the last leg of the monorail back over the tracks, and the last was a bridge to save pedestrian steps. Five of the six bridges still exist today, and one that was not there in 1921 has been added, so there are still six. However, their days may be numbered.

Cooling

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  This is, to my knowledge, the end of the old Ansonia Canal that once ran from the Kinneytown Dam through the center of Ansonia. It was built in 1845 by Almon and Franklin Farrel for Anson Phelps and the new industrial village he was building. At one time the canal ran openly through town. Much of the canal is intact, though it’s mostly invisible to the public now, and few people know it’s there. 

The small building ahead and the buildings to the right are part of the old American Brass Company Ansonia site. It was once the site of Anson Phelps’ brass battery. Farther ahead, the two more modern looking buildings were part of Farrel Foundry & Machine Company. The small building directly ahead contains large pipes, valves, and other equipment that until very recently provided water for cooling freshly-poured metal in the Anaconda-American Brass casting house. 

Farther north, water is drawn off to generate electricity and then returned to the Naugatuck River. It’s about another mile further north along the canal to the Kinneytown Dam, and for all that length the canal flows invisibly beneath a vaulting of tree tracery in a land known joyfully to possums and voles, herons and robins, chipmunks and squirrels.

Composed for my brother by request.

Autumn in Brass Valley

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Storm clouds and crisp, blue days and nights have produced a picture-perfect autumn. Whenever I leave my house the hillsides are dazzling, but I have not yet taken a picture of them. This morning I found myself in the abandoned yards beside the old Benedict & Burnham powerhouse. The Naugatuck River winds through the old, abandoned factory compound.The sagging roof across the river in the background on the right dates from before the Civil War, I’m told. Behind are the slopes and gables of Waterbury’s Brooklyn. Only Autumn and graffiti are thriving here, and I enjoyed both shows.

IMAGINE what this site might become once the toxic waste is gone.

Grand Basilica

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: “Basilica.” There is no better word for identifying these buildings, especially those with peaked roofs. “Factory,” does not necessarily mean a single building. Shed is reductive, suggesting an add-on with a shed roof. “Mill,” “plant,” “shop,” and “workshop” all offer various problems, and none brings to mind these long high spaces where large objects could be built and moved. Often there is a central aisle where the largest work is handled and side aisles for contributing processes. Also like the early churches to which the term is historically applied, additions are made as needed, and often I find several "naves" side-by-side. As I understand it, to the Romans, basilica referred to the hall of justice, and sometime later in history it referred to the hall of  the godly.

I’ve been in none as grand as this, which is an admission I’ve come too late and must have missed the grandest. Note that there are two cranes parked here. The front one is clearly marked for a 30-ton limit. The one in back is marked both on the crane and the hook for not more than 60 tons. The braced rails, of course, must support the weight of both cranes and the loads they carry.

Be sure to click and view this one full screen.

Basilicas of Power

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: They say at one time a single machine manufactured here could fill an entire steamship bound for the sugar plantations of Cuba and South America. I scramble through passages between salvaged parts to find the old work stations where those machines might have been made.

Welding Station

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Unlike gluing or soldering, welding joins two things and makes them one, as when people of different backgrounds speaking different languages bring skills, energy, strength, thought and time toward a common purpose. 

Filing Station

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: 

Still Time

How deeply 

in our DNA 

is time embedded? 

How closely 

is the steady pulse of day to night to day 

synchronized with the pumping of our blood? 

Some say 

the cycles of the moon 

thread our dreams like the tide, 

but for 150 years 

it is the face of a clock 

that time has worn. 

Railroads and factories 

tuned us to standard time 

and everything else fell into step. 

It is not clear to me 

what happened at this station, 

but it is clear it happened punctually. 

Sometimes a clock 

is the only trace that marks a spot of floor by a column or a window,

once a work station where someone spent the better part of a lifetime... 

"Lifetime!"

Safety First

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: The pickling tanks are empty and crusted with residue, and nearby is the emergency shower with its simultaneous threat of danger and promise of safety no longer operational.

Fittings & Dies (color)

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: It remains to be seen whether yesterday’s posting was a serendipity or just a clumsy mistake. The B&W image was inadvertently made from a seriously underexposed RAW file that had been previously developed for compositing the overly bright, windows. It was never intended to be the base of a finished interpretation, but I didn’t realize that when I worked on it this week - thought it was just poor lighting that kept it from working in color.

A story Freeman Patterson told near the start of a week-long workshop ten years ago has stuck with me. It was about a student who realized after a day of wonderful shooting, that her camera was set incorrectly, and all of her exposures were horribly over-exposed. She was in tears and was about to throw everything away although she knew it had been otherwise a sensational shoot. Fortunately, Freeman saw the images and persuaded her to show them to the group. They had been shooting in an old house, and when the group saw the overexposed images, they thought the effect a brilliant way of treating the ghostly, timeless features of the decayed dwelling. The mis-exposed images were a serendipitous discovery.

The group’s discovery bore fruit at the end of the workshop when we all presented a final project on topics drawn from a hat. The most memorable of these was a slideshow of images of a young girl posing in the abandoned house that Freeman’s workshops often used. The model was a frail thing, and the photographer had dressed her in lace and placed her where the light was streaming and had created a series of eerie, haunting high-key images amid the wreckage of the house and highlighting the phrase the photographer had pulled from the hat: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue."

Often we think photography is about getting it sharp and “properly” exposed, but it seems to me technique should be a means to an end, rarely an end in itself, and properly focused, properly exposed are not always what the finished photograph calls for. That said, I didn’t know yesterday when I struggled to render this image in color that I was working on a seriously underexposed original. No matter what I did, colors that should have been vivid would not come to life, and color relationships were off. The shoes, especially, were lost with their orange linings turned to dark rust. However, what was noisy, weak and unusable in color became a flattening gritty surface that led to the image produced. This morning while updating my catalogue, I discovered the mixup and found that if I used the right original, I could render the image as originally visualized in color. 

I also made a new B&W version from the new color version. The new B&W rendering has more local depth than the posted version, more polish, and it lacks the scratchy noise that flattens the posted version, but it’s not entirely clear to me the scratchy flattening is bad and I’m undecided which B&W version is preferable.

Fittings & Dies

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  It took a long time for me to find the right treatment for this composition, and it was hard to give up some of the bright colors that punctuated it, but in the end my eye wanted evenness, clarity and detail to wander through. It is best viewed large. This is one more in a series of manufacturing stations that I began assembling four years ago. Sometimes the stations have been long abandoned, essential items removed or altered, curious items added. Sometimes they are still in daily use and the objects are of the moment.

Dies and fittings such as these were a prominent feature of the brass mill. Metal racks and shelves, both round and square, filled every alley and space between the long draw benches and expansion benches used to work cold tube. In the far back on the left is the giant extruder. Before the pipe can be worked on the benches it must be run through the pointers, right middle-ground. Part of the expander bench can be seen in the row behind the desk.

I knew the man who worked this station, but whatever station he worked, I knew he had been working there by the way he left his gloves. I took this photograph six months after the factory closed; I’d never known him to leave his shoes.