Muscle

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  There is grime, and there is obnoxious grime; the area around the hydraulic pump was second only to the casting house in grime obnoxiousness. Either grime overpowered our washing machine. Neither had met a solvent that was it’s equal. The floor around the pump and motors was a patchwork of greasy and slippery, metal plates that covered, I assume, raceways for hydraulic pipe. To slip was to be forced into grabbing an unsavory surface. 

The pump sat in an alcove where oil puddled on puddled water and where I wouldn’t walk. One of the previous posts below will make clear why. My last Subaru was scarred by the mess tracked onto the back seat by my tripod. And yet the pump repeatedly drew me to wade into its murky corner; it is the essence of Art Deco and a model of sublime finesse.

Note the brick arches in the wall behind the pump, ghosts where windows once lit the 1895 stair tower to a building long gone. The tower just behind the wall is now elegant housing for a tank of hydraulic oil.

For earlier photographs of the hydraulic pump:

http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-turbine.html

http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/search?q=Lang

http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2014/05/hydraulics-101.html

http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2015/02/grease.html

Auld Lang Syne

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: For those who can’t zoom, the actual music titles are, “Sleepers Awake” and “A Patriot’s Prayer.” Minor White suggests: “Photograph things not just for what they are, but for what else they are."

Deco

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Art Deco - was it a style or a fashion? There are always fashions; they change as quickly as the clothes that embody them.  Style is, as one friend recently put it, the outward form of spirit. 

What led so many artists from the 1920s to 40s to draw their imagery from the utilitarian forms of commerce and of industry? Art Deco often proclaims mass production as the key to utopia. Radio City, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State are not only triumphs of technology but radiant, Deco cathedrals of optimism. At the Bauhaus the materials and forms of industry were elevated to principles of Beauty that also prompt the darkly foreboding paintings of Feininger.

What does all this have to do with radios designed to look aerodynamic, and places that appear at the mention of white tie, top hat and tails and whirl on to Gershwin's taxi horns and saxophones still strong when Gene Kelly dances to them at MGM? How does that sleek, heroic imagery resonate in the satire of Chaplin and how is it transformed by Hopper and  in numerous dystopian visions whether Lang's Metropolis, Kafka's Amerika, Huxley's bottling plants and decanting rooms, ...but we will all quickly begin adding our own examples to the list.  It is an art style that didn't even have a name until the 1960's, and we can still put it on like a fashion.  

Can style be sought or must it be left unwatched to germinate and grow?