Saturday, August 27, 2016

The Last Machine, Part 1


NEXT SLIDE TALK: "Brass Valley: The Fall of an American Industry"
Norwich, CT, Otis Library @ 6:30 PM on Monday August, 29.


PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Whether this is the largest extrusion press ever installed in New England, as the men tell me, is a question beyond my expertise. That it is the last machine standing of old Brass Valley is certain.

My friend, Lazlo Gyorsok, and I have been photographing the demolition of Brass Valley since 2010. This year we received a Preservation Award from CT Trust for Historic Preservation for our efforts. For the past two weeks we’ve been photographing the demolition of the last machine. It is an excruciatingly slow process with time for all sorts of photographs. One of the first steps was to slide this giant hydraulic cylinder as far forward as it could go in preparation for removing it from, “the bottle.” Here Art (real names withheld) is removing bolts that connect the fully extended cylinder to the steel block known as the "cylinder cover.” 

The men deny it, but taking this machine apart is a bit like solving a Rubix Cube. Some months back when the machine was operable, the cylinder might have been ejected by running the machine, but power is long gone from this building, and so Ben and Art must plan carefully which piece to move and when to cut so as not to waste effort, time and money.  They do this while recognizing that mistakes can be deadly. The cylinder alone weighs 55,000 lbs. No single machine in the shop is strong enough to lift it. They will have to position it so that two, giant fork lifts can grab it together.

Demolition of this giant extrusion press is, arguably, the final step in the dissolution of old Brass Valley. After this it’s only the truss-work sheds that sheltered the vanished men and machines. These men who have come to pick apart the last spoils of the industry may be the most hard-working I’ve yet met and photographed. 

[Extrusion Press demolition: Former Anaconda American Brass, Ansonia, CT.] 




Sunday, August 14, 2016

Making It Square


NEXT SLIDE TALK: Aug 21 @ 10:30 AM, JCC in Sherman, CT




PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I have been visiting recently with my friend, the cabinetmaker, Craig Chessari and photographing him in his shop in Woodbury, CT.  I’ve caught him in different stages in the construction of a single cabinet. The pace of work is relaxed with time for side conversations that may concern art, craft, music (He has a special love of Russian opera) or an antique tool which Craig has just picked up to use. Sometimes he stops to explain the characteristics of a certain wood or how a joint has been designed to contend with the stresses at work in the wood as temperature and humidity change. However, when Craig turns back to his work he enters a space all his own. His motions are at once calculated and instinctual. When he spins some wooden clamps over his head, it is a dance, when he anticipates the drop of a shaving, his face suggests a song. His music is in making it square, and I’ve taken up his theme.




Sunday, August 7, 2016

Bone White and Dark of the First Opera House


Next book signing and SLIDE-TALK on 
"Brass Valley: The Fall of an American Industry"
August 21at 10:30 AM at the Jewish Community Center in Sherman


PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Main Street in Ansonia passes below these slender windows, but few who go there suspect this silent space is above or remember the stories it contains. It's a relic of its time, silent but for pigeons - except for those with the ears to hear more and the imagination to remember. Recently, the windows on Main Street were boarded up, so now the space is dark as well as silent, and no more pictures will be made. However, when seen, it still looks much as it did in 1870 when it was built. It is a treasure waiting to be discovered and find new life as a gallery or maybe a historical museum to preserve something of the historic mills now being demolished nearby. It might even make a fine exercise club while preserving intact its historic character.

I’m not from town, and I’ll never know it as locals do, but inside and out, the opera house speaks of the decade after the Civil War had boosted manufacturing throughout Brass Valley. Factories increased production to turn out cannons and bullet shells for the war and swelled mill towns throughout New England. In 1870 business leaders of the Borough of Ansonia, not yet a city, decided that Ansonia needed a large, multipurpose meeting space. Twenty-five years earlier there had been no Ansonia. Suddenly the borough was filled with mills and workers and new families and civic groups and associations and events.

A large meeting and function space was needed. It would also be a place for wholesome entertainment the whole family could enjoy; a place for performers to stop along their circuit: minstrels and medicine shows and opera stars on tour. A place they can play to paying crowds - not a theater for lowlifes but a cultural institution for the arts, an Opera House! It would be Connecticut’s first opera house. Imagine Ansonia, a cultural center. A place for Jenny Lind to visit should she make another tour. Did Tom Thumb ever play here?

By the 1870s the men who had pioneered the brass and copper industry in the 1830s, and 40s were becoming elderly and could look around them at towns they had built. Up and down the valley they sought to burnish their legacy with public buildings and infrastructure that would last.  What better investment than an opera house, a place to keep idle workers occupied and out of trouble? Not a music hall or a theater that would provoke rowdies, but an Opera House to give the community culture.

For this project the business leaders hired an up and coming architect. Robert Wakeman Hill. He would go on to design civic buildings and monuments all over the state for which he is justly remembered. He gave the business leaders an opera house with a row of shops along Main Street between the bridge and the mills which Almon Farrel and Anson Phelps had built. The Opera House is a building to fall in love with. In the center, a grand stairway still ascends under crimson carpeting to a second-floor promenade (less-than-grand) past suites of offices boasting the town's most distinguished address, and leading at the end to the more-nearly grand stair that folds back on itself as it reaches up to the third floor grand hall and the grand proscenium arch, both aged to the color of bone. There is no backstage, no fly-space. The floor was level and the seats folded so the floor could be used for roller skating and other indoor activities when needed. It’s unclear when basketball hoops were added. There are still footlights in place.

The Opera House maintained most of its prominence until the labor riots of 1919, though it lost some of its luster when a real concert hall was built in nearby Birmingham. After the 1919 riots a larger and even more multipurpose space was needed, and the armory was built on the hill above the factories with facilities for large functions and others to house troops, if needed. By then trolleys took people everywhere, and people in Ansonia could easily travel to New Haven for entertainment. 

Even then, there were countless town meetings and functions, organizations and committees to keep the Opera House busy. Annually high school seniors took their diplomas there and it became part of their lives. In this manner the Ansonia Opera House continued to serve the community and profit investors through World War II. It’s been silent now for well over half a century, and now it has gone dark as well. What might it become? 


Wednesday, August 3, 2016

The Dressmaker's Daughters - ANNOUNCEMENT


ANNOUNCEMENT

I’m proud and honored to learn that my set of six images entitled, “The Dressmaker’s Daughters,” photographed in the Ansonia Opera House in Ansonia, CT, has been selected for publication in Seeing in Sixes, a volume of art photography that will be available this fall from Lenswork Publishing. 

Seeing in Sixes is the idea of Brooks Jensen who created Lenswork Magazine to explore the potential of photography as an art form. Over many years of publication Lenswork has become for serious photographers what Aperture Magazine was to an earlier generation. 

Seeing in Sixes was born from Brooks Jensen’s belief that book format is an ideal way to present and enjoy art photography. “Sixes,” refers to six photographs set across three page spreads with whatever captions or bit of text might add to the fun. This format provides a container, as rigorous as haiku or perhaps sonnet form are to poetry. In it the photographer may place six images, no more or less, that make a coherent whole. I’m eager to see the other 49 “Sixes” in the finished book. The selection of photographers in the magazine is always eclectic and consistently excellent. I expect no less here. I'm proud to have been included in the first such effort and thankful to colleagues who looked at drafts of the finished submission.

“The Dressmaker’s Daughters,” tells the imagined life stories of four of the dressmaker’s 24 daughters... in six images. 

Those interested in learning about or subscribing to Lenswork Magazine or who are interested in purchasing a copy of Seeing in Sixes, here is a link to the Lenswork site:


NOTE: I will be giving my SLIDE-TALK on Brass Valley: The Fall of an American Industry on August 21at 10:30 AM at the Jewish Community Center in Sherman, CT.


PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  This is the second time this image has appeared in my blog. It is an image that always seemed to work better in monochrome than in color. Since five of the images in “The Dressmaker’s Daughters" were color, I needed to find a satisfactory color solution for  this image in color or I needed to choose another image. In the end I found a solution that saturated color to make the blue window light from the street contrast with the warm interior light of the opera house. The finished color version of this image was one of several challenges met in composing for Seeing in Sixes.