Wangum Pond, the Day before April, 2012, No.3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I'm often drawn to photograph those places where the work of beavers and road crews and other forces of nature cause wetland to swallow what was once rooted and firm. Such places expose time's edge with refreshing bluntness.

Wangum Pond, the Day before April, 2012, No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It is transitory, an interlude, but to the photographer it is the event, the chill calm that succeeds a spring snowstorm before the clouds are seared and the frail architecture of snow gives way. With the palette unified, compositions are abundant, and one good site is all it takes for the time it lasts, no reshooting later.

Wangum Pond, the Day before April, 2012

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Yesterday the birds sang.

Arrangement of Solids

Jeremy Brecher: "Deindustrialization liquidated not only factories and jobs; it liquidated a legacy of community building in the Naugatuck Valley and in working class America. While family networks, unions, churches, ethnic associations, and other working-class institutions had been able to establish considerable control over daily life, they had hardly even attempted to influence the basic decisions of capital. Those decisions, it turned out, could lay waste to everything they had gained."

  

Made in America

Gotham Light

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: After the charging of the furnace I had hoped to catch more images of the flying billets, but when I showed up Thursday they were dealing with some sort of failure, and it may be several weeks before they can resume. So this image is offered as a kind of  "work in progress," to continue the billet processing series. I hope the interruption is as brief as possible.

Time

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: On Monday morning I was up at 5:30 to catch sunrise light and fog, but I lacked a clear destination. Fate brought me here to Burr Pond, up where waters bound for the Naugatuck River collect behind an 1851 dam built by Milo Burr to power a tannery and three saw mills. In 1857, it was the site where Gail Borden built the world's first factory for condensed milk, an important part of the diet of Northern Soldiers during the Civil War. It was initially developed as a park by the CCC.

The sun had been up for 90 minutes by the time I got to Burr Pond and the fog was not especially photo friendly, but the water was still, the air was warm and the birds were singing.

The Charge

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The truth of the foundry is its darkness except where there is light, and then truth comes in flashes, flares and flourishes. Whether beautiful or ugly, they snag on my lenses and make pixels bleed. In the sooted darkness, even bare, fluorescent tubes among the trusses of the shed, glare explosively on my images and must be avoided or removed.

Last Monday repairs were completed on the casting furnace, and Willy began lighting fires for the charging of the furnace. Both Mike and Willy said charging the furnace was a photo op, but I only had a vague idea of what to expect. Willy explained the process and suggested a good place to catch the event, but an hour of preparation remained first. Charging begins with a small amount of metal in a small furnace at the far end of the shed.

It took a long time to bring this metal to the required temperature. Meanwhile a second crucible was being heated next to the furnace. That's where the flames in the picture are coming from. When the temperature was right, the charge was poured into the second crucible which was lifted and carried by crane to the casting furnace at the other end of the foundry. Flames had already been lit there so that all vessels were at the same temperature.

Then Willy poured the molten copper from the transport crucible into the casting furnace. The air ignited. A tempest of sparks whirled from the mouth of the furnace and rose in a plume into the trussed roof. The utter darkness of the cavernous shed sucked up the plume of yellow and orange that kept rising from the furnace while at its base a short, still, white stripe glowed intensely where the molten copper poured furiously. It was a mashup of blinding light and blinding dark, of gush and stillness.

Alas, the plume of sparks rising into the dark vaults of the shed was bigger and taller than my wide-angle lens could grasp; the light brighter and darker than my camera could record, and the motion of the sparks challenged available shutter speeds. I'm considering strategies should I ever get another chance to shoot the charging of the furnace.

Slowly the plume grew smaller and less interesting until Willy leveled the transport crucible and took it away, and they finished loading copper scrap into the casting furnace in order to cast the first billets.

Sooted and Still

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The truth of the foundry is its darkness. To enter it is to find oneself in a haze of 19th century industrial noir, to breathe soot. The foundry seems to call for its own special photo processing. In a photograph, atmosphere and grit tend to be mutually exclusive. In foundry images I often want both.

Mike led me here to this broken down balcony from which I could look down the axis of the foundry and the end of a line of eight furnaces, or the remnants of them, that once cast copper day and night, seven days a week. There is another long axis like the axis of furnaces on the other side of the balcony, out of site. There, incoming scrap was received for processing, twin aisles. The twin axes are crossed by a dome of skylights like a weird transept near the southern end of the shed, but little of the old ritual continues today.

I asked Mike what the balcony was for. He said it held many smaller furnaces; that once there may have been as many as 40 furnaces in all keeping the flow of copper and brass moving back into production.

Everything has been halted while the only furnace still operating is refitted and repaired. The shed is oddly still. Missing is the sound of rushing air and water and the motors of the furnace. As the shed fills with scrap from the manufacturing line upstream, the factory upstream slows almost to a stop. Everything waits for repair of the foundry and the flow of brass billets back into production.

Phantom Station, 11 AM

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

WyPall, Clean Hands to Go

Spirits in the old foundry shed,

sweeping time aside,

Do you hold the missing keys?

Begin the Beguine

from the silent boom box,

new numbers chalked

on old lockers,

and vintage grime, 

allure of the corded desk phone

in biscuit tan,

the scent of lime.

Who will pick up

on the other side

where time has stopped

at quarter to four

in May of two-thousand and nine?

Anatomy Lesson

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  I was back at the foundry again yesterday, hoping to get a shot of the the billets just after they rise out of the pit in which they are formed, glowing like the monoliths in 2001. What I found instead was that the furnace was still shut down, scattered in pieces and unrecognizable to me. However Mike's and Willy's coaching a few days earlier had taught me at least to find the molds. You can see them here; one is behind the broom handle, a quarter of the way down (Click the picture to enlarge it). The other is just to the left of the first.

When the furnace is shut down, the men who regularly run the foundry, work on refitting and repairing it, and as always Mike was happy to show me around.  There were other men there too, engineering staff with the tools to install and test new hydraulics and gas lines and electrical circuits. There is no repair man to call on equipment like this, no single book from which to order the replacement part; what breaks, you fix, what fails, you remake. When conditions change, you innovate. 

Unfortunately, much of their work on the furnace happened in tight spaces and was not visually interesting, so I went off and explored other parts of the campus. I'm told that once, 3000 people worked here. In the foundry alone they said there were 8 large furnaces and many smaller ones. Other shops on the campus processed the new metal from the foundry into wire and rods. In my explorations I passed through what must have been the main engineering shop, row after long row of immense tools and benches, bits and chucks and widgets all in neat, graduated rows, enough to keep at least 100 engineers busy repairing, sharpening, building new. Several hours later I returned to the foundry and the lone furnace, last piece of equipment in operation on the campus.

While I was gone the crew had remounted the crucible on the new hydraulics they had been installing, and the hydraulics were extended, tipping the crucible steeply. It seemed the perfect shot to explain the anatomy of the furnace. In front of the crucible and looking a bit like two fire hydrants, are the plugs (perhaps one of the men will tell me if there is a better term) which close the bottom of the billet molds. The plugs have been raised high, more hydraulics refitted there. 

When I was back at the factory today they were relining the runner box with some sort of material like clay, and they were testing gas lines to the furnace blast. Flames were coming out of the leveled crucible, a picture I missed. They expect to start it up on Tuesday. Before the furnace can be put into operation, the hood will be refitted over the furnace (as shown here). Then the large cover which holds the molds will pivot on the track, back over the plugs, and the plugs will rise into the bottom of the molds. 

The metal tipped from the crucible flows through the runner box to the distributer cups above the molds. As the copper cools, the founder lowers the plugs, and the solid end of the billet drops down and becomes the new plug. Then he tips the crucible to send more fluid metal flowing toward the molds.

I thought about the small cohort of people who were repairing and maintaining this lone furnace, the genius they shared, the bonds they developed, a culture; then I multiplied that many times as it was when the Valley was filled with factories, and families whose children rose through the mills.  Then I thought about the dark sheds around me here, not the empty benches and idle tools, but the culture that had vanished, engine of initiative and innovation. How do we renew that culture, refuel that engine here, where everything is disposable and wealth is digital and what we need comes from somewhere else?

Scraping the Runner Box

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When in place, the runner box directs the liquid copper to the two distributer cups. Before the billets can be lifted from their molds, the runner box must be moved out of the way and scraped clear in readiness for the next pour. The sparks are real, the magic, Promethean.

Distributer Cups

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: From behind the camera lens, removing the billets appears as mysterious as any alchemical incantation. With the flow of metal halted, Willy removes and cleans the distributer cups. The metal flows from the crucible to the cups which distribute and slow the flow of metal into the mold and give it time to harden. The cups must be removed before the fresh billets can be lifted.

At the Crucible, No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I never dreamed such a place existed, and it is a privilege each time I step back in time and photograph here. It is a privilege for which many deserve thanks. Among them are the men who let me photograph them at work, who share stories, and who patiently explain what they are doing and why. There's much left to photograph. This image of the foundry was taken last week.

Casting was in process; molten copper was being poured into forms from which the billets will be pulled that resemble thick telephone poles, 12 or 15 feet long and weigh several tons each before they are cut, drilled, & lathed into blocks to be mashed through the extruder and processed into tubing. I imagined the forms into which the hot copper was being poured and how deep they must be to contain the long billets.

Today when I returned, the foundry had been taken apart, and I could see behind the magic to things previously concealed. Willie pointed to the tin dragon of the picture above, but I couldn't recognize it. Mike took me around and showed me the casting forms and tried to explain, but I didn't understand. Then he took me to another bay and showed me forms that looked like what I imagined, slick, black tubes into the floor that disappeared into darkness. "We don't use those any more."

The forms they do use, the pair he showed me, had, I think, become blocked by a half-formed billet, but the form was only a couple of feet deep. It had been hauled up on the floor so it could be cleaned. How could the long billet I had seen, come from such a short form? Mike was patient with the failure of my imagination, and he again explained how, as the first bit of billet cooled, it became solid and was lowered even as new molten copper was pouring from above. I finally got it, I think. Now, about that water that constantly gushes under the floor beneath the crucible...?

REMINDERS: 

My exhibit, Photographs in Three Acts will remain at the offices of the Register Citizen, 59 Field Street, Torrington, through Feb. 26.  You can view the full exhibit online by visiting: http://registercitizen.zenfolio.com/p339457003

Special thanks to Jenny Golfin for putting together the online exhibit of my photographs and text.

March 3 reception (4-6 PM)  for Brass Valley: Made in America, Sharon Historical Society, 18 Main Street Sharon, CT. The exhibition will remain on view through March and April. See http://www.sharonhist.org/ for days and hours.

Factory Time

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Time Travel

The past is always here,

always elusive,

like a familiar smell 

that lets you know 

you're home, 

though you are a half world away, 

and when you finally 

get back to 

the disfigured 

place that had been 

home, 

you search for that smell, 

crave it, 

even as you 

sip mouthfuls of heartless dust and

savor mildew's inky sting.

Snipe

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: We've learned how to slip through the gate soundlessly, in the shadows so as not to attract attention, but inside the fence we must follow the remains of the train tracks across the large loading plazas where we are easy to spot. Inside the gate is no-man's land. A busy city hums all around us, but nobody knows what goes here. The manhole covers were among the first things to disappear, and the plazas are booby trapped with shafts that end in darkness. Drop a rock, and one hears it splash.

Metal salvage is only one of the things that bring people here. In one of the plazas a couple of lawn chairs and a table have been set up next to a small, covered, storage trailer that has been plundered. The back gate of the trailer was miserably disfigured by the break-in. A broken TV, old scarves and pillows, a gameboy and other debris from the trailer lie strewn across the plaza to a three-legged sofa that has somehow limped to the bottom of a loading ramp. Over several months I've observed no changes to this oasis of domestic tranquility. I have no further explanation.

One day we found the gate wide open, and when we reached the entrance to the largest shed, we saw a car, clean and shiny, parked inside. We called out several times but got no reply. We continued our shoot, though staying close. Old factories are wind instruments, and on almost any day there are a variety of flaps and flappers rattling out tunes and making a buzz. Narrow stairs lead up to a warren of offices, and at the top floor there are views over the city and down on the roofs of some of the factory sheds. On this particular day the band featured a couple of soloists, and we watched as they sawed and banged to remove the large, rusty ventilation covers from the lower rooftops. It was one more insult to the old buildings that would speed their decay. I was pretty sure the metal thieves didn't want to be seen, and I was certain we felt the same. It's the Ruins Boogie-Woogie. On the way out we met the owner of the car. He told us he spent the night here because his girlfriend threw him out. He assured us that he had closed the gate when he drove in the evening before.

Most interesting of all the buildings is the powerhouse, a three-story high atrium filled with furnaces and boilers and pipes and ducts and turbines and electronics and things we didn't understand. In some places catwalks provided access to valves and gauges high on the sides of equipment and up near the roof. Behind the main atrium, a second building of equal height was divided into two floors. It took us several visits before we discovered the cave-like lower story. The entrance had been hidden behind slouching, plastic tarps that had once been thrown up in a desperate effort to keep out the elements after vandals had smashed the wall of glass that protected and ventilated the space around the furnaces.

The upper floor of this back building was like a gallery in a natural history museum. The equipment here stood on free-standing stages, like separate species of jungle cats rowed up for easy comparison and defying identification. In the corner was a large boiler with a coating of thick, white paint pealing and crackling and catching shadows magnificently. I had photographed it once, but I thought I could do better. When I finally got my chance to return, it was clear the metal thieves had been through again. They had begun removing catwalks. Here and there steps were missing from some of the ladders and stairs. I might have mistaken it for an effort at security had it not been so random. As I climbed the metal stair to the upper floor of the back building I had to step over the space where the third stair had been removed. I was glad the thieves had left enough treads in place that I could still get to the top. Once there, I saw the landing had been removed, and I had to go back down and find a board to bridge the gap. I climbed back up, I tossed down a board so I could get across the space where the landing had been, and when I got inside, the iron boiler that I had come to photograph, that had once stood two stories high and as big around as a silo, was gone. I gazed in amazement as I realized the only way they could have gotten it out was to cut it into smaller than door-sized pieces. The museum gallery had become a hall of empty, concrete pedestals.

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

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