Valley Names

FINDING BRASS VALLEY, A PLACE IN TIME THAT HAS ALMOST VANISHED

Sunday, Sept 24 @ 4:00pm

SLIDE TALK & BOOK SIGNING with EMERY ROTH II

The Norfolk Library, 9 Greenwoods Rd. E.

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: The names are nearly forgotten: Israel Holmes, Aaron Benedict, Hiram Hayden among others. The name "Brass Valley” is rarely heard. We pass surviving building clusters without recognition. Few know why brass mattered or that by 1890 brass was Connecticut’s leading industry or that the towns along the Naugatuck River down to Bridgeport and New Haven,  produced 85% of the rolled brass and brass products of the United States.

The Naugatuck River flows across this picture from left to right between the two stacks. On the far side of the river next to the masonry stack chalky smudges on the brick powerhouse still spell out “Benedict & Burnham,” though the company has not existed for more than a century. They made brass wire, rods, tubes, and sheets in buildings on the property around the powerhouse.

On the near side of the river beside the metal stack there is no old sign to identify the property. The brick, gabled building with the Victorian tower was the lampworks of Holmes, Booth, & Haydens, built in 1880 after their original lampworks, on the same site, burned. Between the lampworks and the second Victorian tower can be seen the tube mill building added before 1900. Holmes, Booth & Haydens manufactured a range of brass parts and products in buildings that are no longer grouped around the lampworks and tube mill.

In about 1900 it all became part of a new entity, the American Brass Company, largest brass manufacturer in the world, and the brass industry in the Naugatuck Valley fueled the dreams from which the cities and countryside around Brass Valley flourished. At the same time the old names began to fade, though from the riverside one can still read letters spelling Benedict & Burnham.

Jose at Pickling, 2011

2014

Maya

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I used to think that art was as natural as crabgrass, hemlocks and rabbits; to ask its purpose was to miss the point. While I still believe that, I also believe that art which is lasting explores ones relation to oneself and others, to the planet and nature and to universal forces. Art which dazzles, fades quickly. Art which touches us with some truth has a chance to hold our attention longer and even stay with us. 

After a weekend photographing lobstermen, harborscapes, water and sunsets in the area around Bass and Southwest Harbors I drove to Rockport for a weeklong workshop with, photographer, Keith Carter. His work as represented on this web site (https://www.keithcarterphotographs.com/ghostland) had touched me, and I wondered who the man behind the lens might be, and what he might do to help me open new work. There were 14 of us, and I suspect we all sought the same thing, the path forward. Class time was largely spent reviewing the portfolios we brought and learning about the pictures that most inspired Keith and about many he had made and why. 

Each day we also reviewed photos we’d taken in response to daily assignments which were completed outside class time. Keith provided poems as a springboard to seeing/making new images, but mostly the places around Rockport looked to me as they had looked on previous trips. On the second afternoon, however, we went to an artist’s barn, home and studio where four models were ready to pose for us among an array of curios. My best photos were made there.

One of Keith’s pleas was to ignore the rules. I recalled Freeman Patterson describing the beauty of a roll of pictures that one of his students thought she had ruined by overexposing. Keith told about his own discovery of the power of accidental blurring in his first recognized image. For whatever it’s worth, prior to this workshop I would have rejected this image and not thought to develop it. Although I recalled the moment when Maya’s hands came into full blossom, I had hoped to have stopped them still; I never would have developed the softness of their motion or the moving catchlight in her eye.

By the end of the week we had seen much of Keith’s excellent photography, but it was clear that the roadblocks to new work were at least as difficult for him as for us, and that our most important answers lay in ourselves and in our work. 

I was helped in my photo by Maya who was as much an artist in her modeling as I struggle to be in my pictures. She internalized each of our requests to her as if it was part of a story she was living. Much of the credit for this image goes to her.

We Are Makers

You are invited 

to view seven of my images from an earlier exhibition

On display throughout September 

Stratford Public Library

2201 Main Street,  Stratford, CT. 

Visit the library web site for times

(http://stratfordlibrary.org)

Stratford Library slide-talk: November 5 at 2 PM

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: We are Makers. After our time in the trees, our human minds freed our dexterous hands to do impossible things. Making stuff, handiwork, is in our DNA. At least it’s in mine, which is maybe why it feels like death when a manufacturing region vanishes and a culture of innovation is hollowed out.

Sunset Conversation at Southwest Harbor

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Great photographers warn us that it is not enough to photograph the picturesque. Although photographs such as this may have a short shelf-life, the feelings they evoke are genuine, and when I’m in the area, I never miss a chance for sunrise or sunset at Southwest Harbor. 

The first time I passed here was in the spring of 2006 in an ephemeral moment of hallelujah light. I had scouted the area on my way to a workshop in New Brunswick, Canada, and had returned here from the workshop full of the week’s energies. After two hours photographing seagulls near Seawall, a few miles further south, I had lost my light. The road to my B&B took me past the head of Southwest Harbor, and as I passed, the water and sky blended raspberry to cornflower, the anchored boats gleamed in the light of the setting sun, while mist like whipped cream floated over the horizon behind them. I was blinded by the beauty and pulled the car off the road, but I was already too late. 

I know, it’s only another sunset in another Maine harbor, but I’ve come here many times since. The sun rises beyond the harbor and sets behind it, and I’ve photographed here at sunrises and sunsets. In the back of my mind is always that missed photograph and the knowledge that extraordinary things happen here if one is just persistent and patient and seeking the picturesque.