PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I kept expecting my eyes to adjust to the dark until I realized the dark adhered to every surface, hung in the air, soaked up light like a sponge. The president of the company was leading us on a tour into the darkness of the casting shop, while a foreman in a battered utility cart followed and worried from behind an oxygen mask attached by a hose to a tank in the back of his cart. That was spring, 2011.
The picture on the left was shot in June, 2013; in six months the company would be out of business. Work had already slowed. Then came the pickers and scrappers who contracted to salvage anything of value. They were followed by experts in white suits who detoxified whatever was left. The picture on the right was just taken this month, five years after work stopped. For several months workers have been gone, and the dark has been replaced by purposeless serenity.
