Brass Valley: Made in America

photographs by Emery Roth

March 3rd to April 25th

opening reception - Saturday, March 3rd, 4-6 PM

Sharon Historical Society, Sharon, CT

When I began following the old tracks through the Naugatuck Valley, I wanted to photograph what was left of its industrial past. I was looking for rust and a glimpse of another age. I never expected to find myself in a time warp, photographing where giant hydraulics are still hissing, steel clanking, hot, glowing metal, flying through the air, where the steam still rises from old pickling vats, and men charge furnaces in buildings where the soot has had more than a hundred years to cake. I never dreamed such a place still existed. This is a show about that place.

Safe Hands

ADAM SMITH: "Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.  It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased."

A Family Portrait: Meet the Cutters

from the Torrington Register Citizen

"February Artist of the Month": Emery Roth. Read about it here 

(http://www.registercitizen.com/articles/2012/02/04/news/doc4f2bde1f432f5049492992.txt?viewmode=fullstory).

My work will be on display under the title, "Photographs in Three Acts," through February in the newspaper's gallery at 59 Field Street in Torrington. The, "three acts," referred to showcase three different subjects. They are titled, "Following the Tracks," "Foundry," and "Still Air and Rages."  

The photographs in "Foundry" are a small preview of an exhibit of my photos coming up in March and April at the Sharon Historical Society entitled, "Brass Valley: Made in America."  That exhibit will feature the brass mill photos that I have begun posting here taken at the last working brass mill in Brass Valley.

A Family Portrait: Meet the Cutters

Saw 179

PHOTOGRAPHERS JOURNAL:

An Old Saw

Not so much 

about what it sawed 

as what it saw.

  

Dr. Pickle

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Heavy Metal

"Paging Dr. Pickle!" 

Your pickling vat no longer o'erfloweth,

Spent pickle liquor no longer cascades to the sea,

No sulfuric plumes fill the air,

And your pickling sludge has almost ceased to leach.

Smut is outsourced now;

Even Green Larry has moved away.

Totes '78

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Roosting

Earl C. Banner was first,
penciled lightly, May 10, 1937.
Ed Trewline worked here in '58,
Rich Brodman or Brosman 9-23-82 wanted us to know,
and in 1940 CK & BH marked the date;
so did G.D. Cool and sucks unintelligible in 1972;
and Totes was here in '78,
neither first nor last,
perhaps he was meanest,
He carved his name deepest
in the attic of Anaconda
where pigeons roost and coo.

Pond Bottom Churn

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: We've rounded the cusp, but it's too soon to feel the days getting longer, and winter's deepest blasts are probably gathering somewhere in the future, beyond the reach of forecast. For now we oscillate between freeze and thaw, part of the constant churning engine that makes tomorrow.

It's been awhile since I've been out shooting, and I've missed some great cloudscapes, an afternoon of fog, a morning of snowfall and ice melting along the river. Today never comes back after the ice has melted, and I hope for other snow and ice.

Winterdown

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  It's always interesting the way people react to sunrise and sunset pictures. I'll bet all photographers take them even as many photographers belittle them. To some degree I agree with those who say, it's an easy catch to photograph such prettiness. Certainly the digital world is clogged with images of sunsets, and mine may only have added to the noise. However, that easy prettiness is a challenge that makes the problem interesting: How does one make a sunset photograph that is more than a secondhand version of an event that always has more power when beheld live? How do you make the photo lead somewhere beyond sunset?

Although sunsets may be easy prettiness, they are not really easy to shoot.  Every bright sunset photo is a compromise somewhere between the brightness of the sun and the fragile beauty of the clouds. To save the clouds, we may have to turn the landscape black. On our images bright light blooms around dark corners, melting their solidity, distorting colors in ways that are not like vision.  And even when there is not a speck of dust on the lens, the bright light may erupt into  bouquets of ugly lens flare, or worse yet, lens flare may cast a haze over large areas of the image. The sunset photographer may go right to the edge of achievable results. Now there's a challenge!

Sometimes the light of the sun bouncing from surfaces is even too bright for our eyes. How are phenomena that we can not see to be treated in a photograph? What chiaroscuro magic can we cook up where our eyes are momentarily blinded, and what would it take to create a photographic image that answers that question as elegantly as Turner's "Mortlake Terrace"?  

Often the problem becomes the reverse of what a photographer usually faces: Normally we ask how we can reduce the clutter in front of us to a few manageable forms. With sunsets we often have a beautiful, abstract array of light and color, and the need to find just that bit of the world that gives it context and opens sunset to further meaning.  How can we compose an image where the context is minimally intrusive and maximally communicative?

As the poem following the second sunset notes, the photographer makes the picture; something else makes the sunset. It's cheesy for the photographer to claim the sunset's power as his own. However, the visceral power of the sun disappearing over the horizon has never been questioned. For eternity it has been a sign of our connectedness to something hugely larger than we are and about which we know relatively little. Whatever we believe, a powerful sunset can't help but speak of primal forces at work, and its imagery is essential to our understanding of our place in the universe. We are led to photograph sunsets because we are overwhelmed and moved to try to "paint" with that light; we are moved to express, to communicate ecstasy, exaltation, expansiveness.

On the other hand, I apologize for possibly sending the blood sugar levels of some sensibilities into seizure with two sunsets in close succession, whatever their merit. I take it as a challenge to do better. I certainly don't claim that I have solved any of the problems posed above, but I find them interesting and worth pursuing, and I welcome comments about both where images succeed and where they fail.  In most cases sunset light is most interesting for what and how it strikes, but sometimes cloud events call us to look sunset in the face.  

Did I hear someone wondering why this sunset jabber is accompanied by a cloudy snow scene?

Spring Rebounding

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I pause from an ongoing thread of thought to share wonderful news that cannot wait and to congratulate our son, Emery III and Kate Crescimanno on their engagement to be married. Kate and Emery share a passion for theater, and Jane and I hope that their love and common passions will make a spring ever-rebounding, renewing their love throughout their lives.

A Sunset No. 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Not Hymn

The clouds swim away. 

The photographer asks,  

Where is the axis of the clouds? 

What force holds them for an instant?

Even as they swim away

The photographer makes the picture

Whatever makes the clouds

Makes us

As seed makes trees

As clouds swim away

BOOK SALE NOW until January 31 on all books (including mine) published at BLURB. Go to http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii and enter promo code RESOLUTION at checkout.

Mt. Bushnell

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Looking southwest the light glared, but to the east were clouds of character ready to assume a cloudscape. If only there was a point of focus! The particular subject wouldn't matter; it was a McGuffin. However the logical place to go would be to find an east-facing hill and shoot from there. Instead, we went due east and climbed the west-facing slope looking down on Tanner Hollow and straight into the glaring sun. Photographically it was exactly the wrong way to go, but we'd never been there, and we could see a clearing, high up behind the last corn field, and perhaps a clearing even higher behind that, and the clouds above them looked beautiful, and of course, we'd never been there.

The last cornfield was plowed across a steep hillside already high above Tanner Farm. Climbing, we stumbled over cut stalks like stubble on a giant's chin, Each time I looked back the clouds glared from behind a muddy, gray mass of stuff: fields, forest, farms, and hills - until I reached the top of the cornfield and turned around again. That was when I began to see the familiar shape of Mt. Bushnell at the back of Lake Waramaug and recognized the land I somehow knew, but from a new angle, the world tipped up for me to see.

Just as when shooting a bust portrait, one wants the oval of the face in the upper two thirds of the frame, greater height was needed to give Mt. Bushnell sufficient neck.

We finished climbing the field behind the field and the field behind that; and when we got there the trees that divided the fields were a scrim, and Mt. Bushnell stood hazy and clear in the first blush of what I thought would be a lazy, hazy sunset that would burn itself out pointlessly, and that was when my companion thought of a better place to shoot if we just hurried down the hill again to our cars.

It took strong incantations to pull this image from the murky light, but this is much as it appeared through my medium long lens, which is to say it is definitely a photograph and not some other species of graphic manipulation.

A Sunset

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The clouds came in waves rippling at first like sand on a pristine beach, then with the regularity of marchers crossing Connecticut or like time itself, and it reminded us of the distance they had traveled and the vastness of the byway; and just then as the sun began to set, the clouds lost discipline, broke apart, dissolving into the night sky.

Sunset Pastorale

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I arrived at Sunset Ridge Farm to the same spot I had photographed from six months earlier. (See yesterday's TODAY'S.) The photographer is a light chaser; the wanderer is happy to take what comes. On a given day I may be either. When broken clouds provide a light show I can be both at once.

That was what I expected at Sunset Ridge, but the balance between cloud cover and cloud break had shifted decidedly to favor the clouds. Twice the sun strafed the hills with light, and then it seemed there would be no more, and my shooting companion suggested we become chasers. We lost each other on top of Winchell Mountain when I followed a strange dewy, yellow light and stopped on this hillside with a dream of the Catskill Mountains in front of me and the low sun painting shapes on the hillsides. If someone had said I was in Brigadoon, I would have believed them.

Back at home in my computer "dark room" I struggle to recall the eerie glow that flickered over the hills and to catch the misty haze filtering bits of the slant light from the setting sun. It was a magic almost gone by the time I could click the shutter and maybe beyond the reach of photography.

Sunset Ridge Farm and Hiddenhurst Beyond

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Sunset Ridge is one of the few remaining dairy farms in the area. In fields where they are not pasturing cows they are raising corn, and a lot of corn grows here and around Hiddenhurst. Hiddenhurst itself is idle though maintained. From this spot and a few others, one can imagine the valley when farmsteads dotted the hilltops and cows and corn and crops were everywhere. From Hiddenhurst looking west beyond the rail trail where the milk runs have ceased, and the chugging is all cyclists now, you can see the ruined silos of Hanover Hill, gaunt at the edge of the valley.

I took this photo just before the summer solstice a bit over six months ago. I was here again the other day. The wind was cold and ice puddles dotted the field. What a difference a solstice makes. Otherwise, it probably looks much as it did a hundred years ago. It will not be so a hundred years hence.

Ruins of Hanover Hill Farm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When dairy was everywhere in this region, this valley could still be called a dairy center. The land supported large herds that required large barns. Most of the herds are gone and the hills are littered with husks like this. Well, not quite like this. From the road it always looked a bit more derelict than the others, almost haunted. Now, it's just a charred ruin.

I only once got this close. The man who lived in the last inhabited building on the site agreed to let me trespass, though he reserved the right to scowl about it afterward, and when I returned a second time, as was our understanding, he chased me down in his ATV before I could cross this field. He turned red like a blackberry and screamed about some lady who photographed the barns from the public road. I've rarely seen anyone so angry, and I left him on his smoking ATV and walked away to photograph up the road a bit, but he soon followed after and let me know the public road was his as well. My car was parked a short way off; I considered my tires and my paint. I left, and the bad karma kept me away for a long time.

I didn't mean to provoke him a third time. However, the barns still fascinated. Their gloom was unmatched. The black gambrel that burned was large and gothic, a full two-and-a-half stories of hay storage above the cow shed. If one knows where to look the barns are visible from a number of nearby hills, and I set out to discover them all. A few of the locations were useful, but the shots were all more distant than I wanted, though from one hill I could see small gambrel-roofed entrances with flaring skirts. I imagined the cathedral inside.

I finally got permission from the owner of the organic farm right across the street to climb his hills and photograph from his fields. Little did I know that the one with the view belonged to the abandoned farmstead, and the berry-tempered man was ever belligerent. Before I could set my tripod, I saw him two fields down and across the street on his ATV, already berrying rage and purple against the green field, this time with a friend on a second ATV.

Again, I apologized  and walked away with nothing usable, though he found it difficult to believe I wasn't trying to provoke him, and it kept him screaming after me for a long, long time. After that the karma was beyond me, and I didn't go back. Then in March someone told me the barns had burned. I had to drive by to convince myself it was true. All the buildings are empty now and the traces are faint of all the lives that have echoed here. I'm told some of the finest thoroughbred Holstein cows were bred in the burned-down barns.


Here are links to my photographs of Hanover Hill Farm before it burned:

http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/04/poised-for-spring.html
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/04/hanover-hill-farm-in-decline.html
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/04/spring-storm-over-hanover-hill.html
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2011/04/hanover-hill-postcard.html
http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2009/10/grand-cowshed.html

In the Groove

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

Here continents collided in doughy churning enfolding an ocean sliding through the tropics before pulling apart, 

and life ever since has run in the orogenic folds. 

Does it run here still, or has the terrestrial fabric been rent in digital orogeny?




BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore

The House on Hanover Hill

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Waiting

Inside the puddle's stain

where the setting sun rises, 

a boy climbs the branches of the tree, 

and a bird can be heard 

as it skips from limb to limb

at a shallow edge

inside the puddle's stain

where the winds are zephyrs, 

a mother takes laundry from the line 

thinks forgotten thoughts

of the parcel on the postman's wagon

where the water is deep

inside the puddle's stain

where a light behind the window glows

the woman sits still illumined

beside her folded linens

as the boy leaps and lands

in the middle of the dark stain

Inside the puddles splash

BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore

Rooted

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Swan snow sparkling still settling frail transient 

on the old, stone Averill homestead.

BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore

Farms that Straddle

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: There are still a few places where an old road, preferably a dirt road, winds through the middle of an ancient farmstead. They are a welcome discovery, though sometimes it's hard to get a lens around them gracefully and make them into a place. It is exactly this, "placeness," that I most enjoy about them.

If my road leads through a working farm, it feels preoccupied with daily chores. I am an intruder as much as if I had crossed through the family's kitchen during meal preparation. However, photography has taught me that such places are a wonderful intersection of private and public space. They are an opportunity to meet the farmer at his labor as I seek permission to photograph on his farm. Many farmers welcome conversation and a few moments' pause, and some share stories and offer tips on the best views. Sometimes they take me on a tour to show off the new piglets or share ancient yarns and family lore.

Such places must have been more common once. Whether a road was public or private, road maintenance was once the responsibility of the landowner; it was especially hard work and totally non-productive. One didn't want too many slushy spots that needed to be restored after every spring thaw. The farmer who maintained the road wanted to make good use of it, and traffic, such as it was, was probably light.

When one passed through a farm, one might pass waiting wagons of hay, dodge ducks, chickens chucking and gabbling, and sometimes the world paused while a whole herd of slow cows headed out to pasture. Even if daily traffic was light, surely friends stopped and regulars and all weary wayfarers. Their visits seasoned the week and spread the news. As much as the front porch, these yards where farms took possession of the public road were points of interchange.

Today they are rarer than roadside tree rows and often as fragile. Such places not only battle the usual sprawl and decay that consume old farmsteads, but they are constantly harried by the automobile's need for faster, wider, straighter, and soon the port side of the roadway has forgotten the starboard for the raceway in the middle. Too often I find myself speeding by spaces where the place has vanished, catching lingering traces passing: a forlorn barn too close to the road, a house with a big, front porch facing an empty field and a ruined silo, phantom nodes along a vacant network,

This road (above) has passed through the middle of Averill Farm since 1746. The cows have turned to apples, but the farm continues with the 9th and 10th generation of Averills farming there today.


NOTE: Averill Farm is the setting and inspiration for The Magical Christmas Horse, a new children's book by Wendell Minor and Mary Higgins Clark. You can read about it here.

Solstice at Straight Farm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Straight Farm rides a gentle shoulder of arable farmland to the boggy bottom of the Great Hollow. The farm ceased operation decades ago though the barns and fields are used by neighboring Cold Stream Farm. For a long time it's been a quiet place except when hay was being cut, or the bales piled into the barn. This year the lower barn became home to a noisy household of chickens, roosters, and turkeys. They cackle and crow and cluck merrily ignorant of what the holidays mean for them.

This photo was taken on March 21, 2011. The next day it was spring. As we head into a new winter we have already had an unusual autumn blizzard that took down ancient trees and caused chaos throughout New England. However, we've had nothing since, and as the holidays approach it feels as if it ought to snow.

BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore

Top Cow

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Winter View

How now,

top cow 

trying to see over sunset? 

Hey diddle diddle 

a cow's in the middle, 

they'll come and correct you.

Meanwhile

on top of your pile,

fly over the moon to tomorrow.

Quintet

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: May, 2009: A calm sea, but the truth is, all hope dimmed of having a pleasant sea journey from Nova Scotia to Bar Harbor as I cased out The Cat. I had never imagined a tourist ferry would be built with no public, deck space. It was a sealed tin can moaning and rattling incessantly. We had little contact with the ocean outside. Well, after inquiring, I was directed to the very back where symmetrical doors led to about a dozen feet of deck stretched across the ferry's stern. The Cat is a ferry with room for trucks and cars and hundreds of people. Twenty would make this deck feel crowded. When I sat on the only benches provided, my view was obstructed by the rail. Build it, and they will avoid it in droves. I had nothing better to do. I sat down and observed a succession of riders step out, look around at the prospects and head inside for a movie or the slots or to sit comfortably and have some food before zoning out for the next few hours.

Occasionally people went to the rail for a moment of fresh air or explored in the hope of finding a stair to more deck space, but by the time the sun set, even most of the pausers had drifted on. We took in the last of the day. I couldn't have asked for a better alignment at the point where trajectories crossed and then went on, still strangers.

On Moonlight Bay

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This was an experiment I made last winter as I resumed my photography. At the moment, I can't even remember the shoot. When I viewed it unprocessed on my computer all I saw was the round globe of the moon. I'm sure I didn't expect much when I took it, and so when reviewing shots, I dismissed it without further thought.

Why experiment if you don't look at results? Today, while going through promising material from old shoots, I decided to see what was really there in my casual experiment . To my surprise, when I lifted the shadows from an image that seemed only two flecks of something and the familiar textured orb, I found a fully composed nightscape. Of course it's a bit grainy, but the exposure was spot-on; detail was already slightly blown out in much of the moon disk. I've cropped the original slightly for balance, but I'm not certain I shouldn't have used it all.

I wish I could remember shooting this and where it was taken. Clearly, I was on the way home and saw the moonrise at a miraculously handy pond. The metadata tells me it was March 24th at 7:50:18 AM EDT. The date is right; I dated the folder I saved it in. The time, clearly, is not.

It was a Thursday evening. On that date in my area the moonrise occurred 25 minutes after midnight, and the disk of the moon was 76% illuminated. This close to the horizon it would appear elongated, so 76% looks full. If anyone can identify the house, I can probably triangulate to find my precise location on the shore and maybe remember this lost moment.



SHAMELESS ADVERTISING: Until Dec.17 Blurb will give you a 25% DISCOUNT on any two BLURB printed books (even if they are mine, but, alas, not the inexpensive e-book edition).  Use the promo code REDHAT. Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore.

Underbelly No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: However, after the extruder has been running for awhile, the beast's belly is a bit of a greasy sauna, and when the mandrel is extended, and the die hanger (here Spike) swabs it down, the extended mandrel smokes.

REMINDERS: 

PRESENTATION: Tuesday, Dec. 13, 7 PM, Noble Horizons, Salisbury, CT. Click for directions.

BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore

Underbelly No.1

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Next, the die hanger (here Jose) climbs in between the ram and the container and swabs grease where the hot block has just been extruded and rubs down the mandrel. Early in the morning when the press is cool, it's not too bad in the belly of the beast.

REMINDERS: 

PRESENTATION, Dec. 13, 7 PM, Noble Horizons, Salisbury, CT. Click for directions.

BOOKS: Prison, Farm, Best of Todays, 2008, Click for bookstore.

Cutting Edge

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

 Cutting Edge

The cutting die 

provides the edge, 

the point of transformation 

beyond the mandrel 

in the maleable moment 

heat and pressure 

making metal molten

turning block to pipe 

while it leaves 

the metal's

crystal 
structure 

intact &
compact.

The die sometimes burns grease even after the pipe has been sent on. To keep the dies from overheating, the die hanger (here Ken) exchanges the hot die with the one that has been cooling, as he sets up to process the next block.

Reminders: 

Housatonic Camera Club presentation, December 13, 7 PM, Noble Horizons, Salisbury, CT.

My books on Blurb:  http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

The Tube Cutter

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

I will be speaking at the annual holiday meeting of the Housatonic Camera Club on December 13th at Noble Horizons in Salisbury, CT (link to map). This will be a repeat of the presentation, "A Tourist at Home," that I gave at the Kent Historical Society of photographs taken among farmsteads of the Litchfield, Taconic, and Berkshire Hills. 

The event is open to the public, and the presentation begins at 7 PM in the Community Room. Those who wish to attend the dinner as well as the presentation should make arrangements with Judy Becker (judybecker40@att.net) by Tuesday, Dec. 6th.

The fee for the meal is $24 ea. Cocktails at 5, dinner at 6, 

•

Farm: Personal Wanderings among the Berkshire, Hudson, and Taconic Hills is a book of pictures, poetry and prose about photographing the old farms of New England. It includes many of the images that will be part of the presentation on December 13.  My bookstore at Blurb:   http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

My most recent book, Prison - The Shape of Freedom is now available in a deluxe, 12X12 edition printed on heavy, uncoated paper. The pictures have never looked better. It's also available as a 7X7 paperback that will almost fit in your pocket. For real portability, the iBook version looks great even on a tiny iPhone. My bookstore at Blurb:   http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The Tube Cutter is last on the line. Here Randy is Tube Cutter. He runs the controls that turn the shaft that rotates the fingers that lift the tube and deposit it on his conveyor. He also runs similar fingers that get the tube from the tube puller and drop it into the water tank. Finally, his controls also run a band saw that cuts the raw end of the tube where the die has been removed. In theory, he should never have to touch the tube.

When he's finished, the work of the extruder is done, but work on the tube is often just beginning.