W.A.A. Award

I'm pleased to announce that in the recent juried show at the Washington Art Association, my photograph, "Made in America" won 2nd place and a cash prize. Information about the show can be found at: http://www.washingtonartassociation.org/exhibitions/membersshow/thewinners/

Downstream

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Upstream Music

Upstream, 

rivers 

begin

as 

raindrops. 

They fall, 

splash, 

gather in puddles, over

flow into rills 

and creeks, 

runnels and freshets,

minnows and frogs,

beetles and waterbugs,

scarabs and butterflies, 

they tumble down cataracts, 

cascade along brooks and bubbling 

streams that wind through woods and meadows before 

becoming rivers surging white in spring rains, racing, spilling over 

waterfalls, 

where they pause.

In deep pools where trout lurk

they carry on the fugal singing

ever downstream

or along the gulf stream

or upswept

in an airstream 

in fogs and clouds and drops of rain

born at thirty-two feet per second per second.

As they fall they gain momentum

surge and coarse through

the industries of our kind

and whirling gusts 

in the maelstrom of

whatever's next.

We are their children

and long to honor them

as we desecrate their shores.

Rimmon Falls on the Naugatuck

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

Nawkatunk

The first settlers 

followed the tracks 

the native people used

that followed the river

they called, "Naugatuck."

It was the easy way 

through wilderness boscage 

where native people hunted and fished 

and where settlers soon built mills, 

developed expertise in brass and copper

and later rubber, 

and where imaginative people 

built what they imagined. 

When railroads shot up the valley 

like vines up a sycamore, 

opportunity drew laborers

sprouting families, churches and schools, 

social clubs and selectmen, 

societies and brotherhoods, 

sisterhoods and neighborhoods, 

unions and country clubs,

parties and alliances,

relationships that helped communities 

endure and thrive.

Huntington, Birmingham, 

Ansonia, Humphreysville,

Beacon Falls, Naugatuck, 

Mattatock, Thomaston, 

Wolcotteville, and Winsted became

the towns that made the world's copper and brass.

Along the river by Rimmon Falls

in the time before the settlers,

near where the brass mills used to be, 

its told, 

there was "this old tree," 

"Naw-ka-tunk,"

in the native tongue,

a sweet place in the shade

prized for good fishing.

Watch Your Step

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Move to the Rear

Watch your step, 

Move to the rear. 

Hold on to the hand rails 

when stepping up or stepping down.

Please keep your bags out of the aisles. 

Don't crowd.

Let departing passangers pass.

Watch your step getting off. 

Move to the rear.

Good Ol' Jack

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Would you buy a used digger from a raked gasser like that?

For the New Year No.2: Sweetheart

Beth Slater Whitson:  "Let me call you 'sweetheart.'  I'm in love with you."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I guess this series is devoted to the many ways our cars become us.

Remembered in Goshen

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  It was probably sometime in 2010, wandering in Goshen, when I discovered this farm. It was no longer in operation, and I spoke to the owner about his plans. There were men running earth movers in this field, but he said he intended to continue farming here though he lived elsewhere. He gave me permission to walk the property and photograph. He told me about the crumbling graveyard in the middle of the field behind me, and though I went back several times afterward, I never saw him again.  The detailing on the barn was crude, but I liked the bold proportions of the two cupolas, like no others I've seen. Because overstated, they work especially well in silhouette. The lower level was flooded, but the owner told me he hoped to save it.  When I went by this fall all the barns were gone.

I could have removed the power lines from this image and have done as much in other images, but such wires are a common feature of farmland, and I liked their relation to the local pole beside the barn. Was it put there in 1914 to bring the first electricity from the new Housatonic power grid in Falls Village. This was a family farm, and from the rambling sprawl of the house, I suspect it encompassed several generations. Usually I know something of the history of barns I photograph, but I know nothing of this one, and now it's gone. I must make a pilgrimage to the cemetery to see if the names are legible now.  

I can still hear one photo instructor asking me why I bother to take such photographs. I dunno.  I just do. Perhaps it's just for the record.

For the New Year

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  It's hard for me to believe that I've been making entries to this blog for a full six years, that this is the 973rd photograph I've posted.  My sole aim when I began was to challenge myself to a program of self-improvement by  committing to post a new photo daily (at least every third day) and to try to make each photograph better than the previous one.

The role of this written journal has evolved. It has always been a place for me to leave notes to myself and to record thoughts on photographic issues and to discuss what happened on the shoot.  More and more it has become a place for me to react in an expressive manner to the photograph posted and often to try to make photo and text speak as a whole.  The first draft of "Prison," was composed in these journals, and at least since then it has come to feel like a kind of failure when the text portion is less ambitious than the visual.  That new challenge has slowed down the production of new postings and has often played an, arguably, improper role in the picture selected for the day.  To remedy that, I resolve to forgive myself for more frequently posting a picture without any journal entry.

I will also recall that, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," and will forgive myself in advance the foolishness of my excesses. I will repeat Blake's words thrice daily to inoculate myself against the arrogance of foolishness.

A final issue occurs to me regarding this blog.  The daily stream of photographs created by a blog has its own story-telling rhythm. It is totally unlike the experience of looking at images in an exhibition or in a photo book.  Daily posting is less tolerant of images that rely on their context with other images to exert their full meaning.  By posting a single image at a time, every image seeks autonomy.  That's part of what makes producing this blog a valuable challenge for me.  However, as in the images shared from travels, and as I look toward books, I sometimes feel the need to post supporting images, images that fill in a bit of background to the larger story.  If in the future I make more supporting posts, the test for posting on the blog remains to try never to post an image that I would not enjoy framing, hanging, and looking at on my wall.

Many thanks to all those who look and/or read sometimes, all the time or from tim to time, and especially thanks to all those who occasionally send word to tell me what they thought about or especially liked or would like to see differently.  So begins year seven.

Just in Case of Owls

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  It was our friend who spotted it there on the branch of the hemlock just outside our bedroom window and called us.  Living in the woods we hear them sometimes at night, and occasionally they swoop across the road as we drive up the valley, and it's hard to be sure who is more startled. Even then, daytime sightings are a sign of turmoil and are brief. I've never seen one stopped, waiting. An owl here? ...perched on a branch three feet from where we slept? We were spellbound, whispering. It was more than impossible; it was portentous, worthy of Poe. Then I remembered the pair of cardinals that had been pestering the glass at our bathroom window and nesting there a dozen feet away, easy prey. 

Regardless of any deeper meaning, this was a two-gallon owl and a clear photo op, but to catch the image I had to shoot obliquely through a thermal window.  Light was low and exposure settings were extreme.  The owl seemed to feel safe even from photography on the other side of the murky glass, though once or twice it looked our way.  After shooting as best I could through the window, I decided to go outside and walk around the house to where the owl was perched, but before I could get within fifty feet, I saw the great pointy wings turn slantwise and launch between branches into the deeper woods and then vanish like smoke as if the bird had been a sorcerer all along.

Shot, as it was, through thermopane, I didn't expect much from the image, nor is it a technique I'll look to repeat, but I wouldn't mind having a thermo-optic filter in the kit just in case of owls.

Nocturn

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Wherefore?

Blacksmith's Shop in Winter

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The solstice brought snow reminding us that the holiday season is suddenly here whether we feel ready for it or not. My day began when Jane nudged me to consciousness and said, "Look, how pretty!" as she looked out our window at the snow-trimmed hemlock and our felled oak, coated in snow. 

I shot this image of the old blacksmith shop in January of 2010, after another light snowfall.  I wonder what marks three more winters have left. Photographs track me like footprints along a path that has so far led from cow tracks to train tracks in a search to photograph secrets and beauties where I live.

Brass billets have been piling up in Waterbury while the extruder has been out of commission, but the outlook in the factory is good for the new year. That's good for those who work there and good for making photographs.

Viridescence 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

The Sea Turtle

Color, light and melody glide

beside oblique arpeggiation.

Preparing the Charge, No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Photographing fire has always seemed to me a tricky thing to do and rarely fully satisfactory. Photographing it here, where soot-coated walls suck up all ambient light, gave me special difficulty. I'm at ISO 1600, f/1.8 and a shutter speed of 1/60. Without further processing in Photoshop the fire is blown out, and everywhere else details are buried in shadow. Willy was mostly in motion, so I set my focus point to the scrap, copper tubes. This is another of the images taken the first time I witnessed the charging of the furnace. Here he is heating the initial charge to a precise temperature. The second time I saw the charge, I arrived too late to catch this part.

Today I went back, hoping to catch the ritual blaze again, but the best guess now is that the initial charge of the furnace will be tomorrow or Saturday when I can't be there. No matter.  I spent  three hours in the powerhouse. 

I believe I have now done serious shoots in every important interior space of photographic interest that I've been able to find at both the Waterbury and Ansonia campuses. How many buildings is that? Most of these spaces are unused. Some are abandoned, but I've posted few photos from them.  I'm not sure why I reached the powerhouse last. It is rich with potential still. Shooting there makes me think that I have arrived at a milestone where I can begin to assess the scope of what I'm about and plan a bit on how to continue and what the end production might be.  Each of the abandoned spaces will be a photographic adventure in light.  

Today, just as I was leaving the powerhouse, the low, winter sun came around to the front of the building and shines through the tall front windows, and how it shines across a wall of gauges and knobs and across large engines that cast monster shadows in one of the two three-story spaces in the building.  I know I also need a dark, overcast day to shoot the adjacent, three-story machine room beside where steam boilers used to hiss and roar.  I need to think about each space in relation to seasons and sunlight.  I need to focus on exteriors. I need to talk to Wally who knows some of the history and how everything works. It's time to plan.

The Charge

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  This week they are again rebuilding the furnace inside the foundry. I hope to be back then to catch a repeat of the ritual shown here.

The first time the furnace is restarted after any repair is a photo event.  The first time I saw it, I didn't know what to expect.  When the big shower of sparks began I was too close, the wave of sparks flew by too quickly, and the exposures I had guessed at were overwhelmed. I shot with the bucket in profile, but the light of the pour was huge, and the dark bucket form was uninteresting.  I readjusted as best I could, but there was no time to move to a new angle.

In a blog entry of that event on March 18, 2012 (http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2012_03_18_archive.html) I described the charging process, but I had missed my "money shot." I shot good images of Willy and Lucio preparing the metal for the charge, but none of this dramatic moment.

This image is from October 4th when I got my second chance.  With my camera set to ISO 500, f/1.8, and a shutter speed of 1/125th, I chose to shoot from behind the crucible as it poured. It had been the least likely choice. From this angle the crucible blocked the pour but also blocked the glaring shower of sparks that erupts, and reveals the striking silhouette.  What I had not counted on was added light from windows behind me that helped illuminate foreground forms and which let me relax exposure settings beyond what is possible further inside the gloom.

Ansonia Waterfront

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  There is no more iconic sight in Ansonia than these filters, ducts and chimneys - high order industrial sculpture. If these buildings were gone, what would we know of the years when the river ran in colors, and downwind was bad wind? Inside this shed is the soot-caked cathedral where I've photographed Mike and Willy pouring hot copper into giant billets for the extruder upstream. Once 41 furnaces rumbled there. Now there is one.

The flood waters of 1955 washed over the sewage of a dead river, a balm for its agonies and everywhere else devastation. The days of Brass Valley were waning.  Today, the river has been brought back to life, but here it is a dead zone out of reach.  There is hardly a place anywhere around where one can reach the banks. Safely protected behind the flood-walls, filters and ducts, pipes and tanks, stacks and chimneys cling to the old foundry like barnicles. They are a rare surviving vestige of our smokestack past and a monument to its genius.

There is a constant tension in a photo project such as this between photographing to document, which is not this blog's aim, and photographing to express. Of course documentary photography must often be very expressive, but on this blog the expression precedes the subject. The difference is between trying to portray the "decaying factory," or alternately, trying to portray "factory decay," or even to make the viewer feel in the factory decay, his own cold mortality

Put this entry under the heading, "Document," while I consider how to scale the chimneys.

Command Post

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In 1844 when Anson Phelps was looking for water power for the new mill he wanted to build in Birmingham, and he found all the best land taken, he crossed the Naugatuck River and stood somewhere here. The Naugatuck flows through that cleft between the hills at a point very close to where it joins the Housatonic. That was as far inland as ships could sail. 

Phelps purchased this land and called it Phelpsville, but by the time the water channels were engineered and built, and Ansonia Brass and Battery was battering out kettles for Phelps-Dodge, Anson Phelp's new town was known as Ansonia. Soon a wire mill was added, and in 1869 Phelp's company was incorporated under the name Ansonia Brass and Copper.

We are looking through the window of an abandoned office from the mostly abandoned headquarters of Ansonia Brass and Copper.  Whoever had this office had an important command post.  The main east-west axis through the campus is just behind the newly sprouted willow, and anyone driving through the gate would pass in front of him. The sawtooth roof by the back chimney covers what's left of the foundry that once had more than 30 furnaces cooking, and where a single furnace still turns out giant, copper billets. The front chimney belongs to the powerhouse. Those chimney's mark the most volatile areas of the factory and if there was an explosion or fire there, the person sitting here wouldn't need to be told about it later.  

Even today Ansonia Brass and Copper is an extensive conglomeration of buildings with three main north-south streets and sheds reaching far to the right. The railroad that went into operation in 1849, just as production must have been getting underway, still runs north-south between the two, far rows of buildings, and the Naugatuck River still flows just behind the back row. However, like this administration building, most of the sheds lie silently accumulating the patina of disuse while roofs crumble and flake.

(You can read an earlier entry on the founding of Ansonia here: http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/05/back-room-shelton-ct.html)

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?

Hydraulic Pump

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: "Men have become the tools of their tools."

Submerged

PATRICK SUMMERFIELD: "Art starts where consciousness ends. This is why we must invent untruths for those who require explanations."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Whether this has started being art or not, I'll leave to my analyst when I have one after I am committed.  However, the photography that most engages me is always about seeking to get beyond the mechanical, rational mind until something clicks. If it's any good, later, in processing, things keep clicking.  For me, the clicks are much the same whether in Waterbury or Galapagos.  After that, I only hope the images click somewhere else.  Other photographers tell me that they also have felt a certainty that goes beyond mechanics when capturing some of their best shots. Is there any value in knowing this?  I still don't know how many clicks it needs until its art.  I guess a lot. Perhaps my analyst will know.

Joyous Noise

May you have good fortune to celebrate and those you love to toast with on our national day of harmony and throughout the year. 

The Heron's Eye

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: One might almost think that the lava heron was rock's way of getting about and seeing a bit of the world.