On Still Water

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

On White Pond

The swan glides

On a slick of silence 

Serene soundlessness resounds.

Polyphony of Earth & Sky

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  At Fawn Pond deep in White Woods, Monet time again amid peepers' songs.  There is magic in mud, and more than lilies are bubbling at the bottom, struggling to be born. Although the songs are of spring, the ceremony still wears the colors of autumn.

Only a few days left!

Brass Valley: Made in America

photographs by Emery Roth

March 3rd to April 25th

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. (http://blogz.org/Blog828566-Brass-Valley-Made-In-America-Photo-Exhibit-At-Sharon-Historical-Society.htm)

NEVER BETTER: There's never been a better time to order one of my books. The Blurb book store is offering a 25% discount on all orders. Go to http://www.blurb.com/user/store/erothii to preview my books, and use promo code MDAY to claim your discount.  The sale ends on May 2.

Hilltop Barn, Peter's Valley, Spring, 2010

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Slow Sacrament

Lifted on queen posts,

Wind-braced and weathered

Purlins in procession

Uphold the liturgy

Ready as they bend,

Though it's not clear why.

Red Ventilators

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Spirit Condensations

For the steamy breath of cows,

their honeyed scent 

and sweat of

sweet lactations 

and ruminations 

and cowlike conversations

that once kept this old barn warm, 

I moved closer,

but all was cold and dry.

Barn with Red Ventilators, Peter's Valley, 2010

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Of all the barns of Peter's Valley, this one kept drawing my eye for the beautiful way it caught the afternoon sun and for the red ventilators which stood out against the amber of the early spring leafing. It was along a narrow, windy stretch of the chief north-south road, few places to pull over, and I passed it many times before I found a place to stop.

Most of the farms of Peter's Valley were dealt a death sentence when the land was condemned for a hydro project that never happened. Sixty years later, and except for the ones at the craft center, all are crumbling ruins. They have a mysterious, silent melancholy, but not this one.  It seems to house some park function and the old spirits have been thoroughly exorcised. I stopped briefly. Pretty as it was, it felt totally dead.

This image is very close to the view that drew me as I passed by on the road.

April Showers, Peter's Valley, 2010

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Does it communicate? I took this photograph on April 17, in 2010, a bit over two years ago. The barn is in Peter's Valley near the Delaware River in New Jersey. I was attending an annual photographer's retreat. I posted other photos from Peter's Valley intermittently in 2010 from May through June . One last shot appeared in July,  

If other photographers are anything like me, this photo illustrates the uneasy relationship we sometimes have with what we have shot, or am I alone in this?  Reviewing shots the day of a shoot or even the day after is almost always a disappointment. I like to get at least a week out before I comb for keepers and for shots I want to add to this blog. That's a good time to start reviewing and marking images I may want to process. While reviewing "the contacts," I resist the urge to stop, but sometimes I'm stopped by an image that calls to be processed now. 

However, it was months later when this photo called, "stop!" I thought I was done with Peter's Valley/2010 shots. It was not much to look at unprocessed, a difficult photo situation, and I prepared myself for an HDR, but after much tugging on tonalities and texture, I liked what I had and put it in a folder I keep for images I may use, and there it has sat, and it continues to draw my eye, but it's one of those images about which I wonder, does anyone else see it as I see it? Does it communicate the things I've come to enjoy in it?

What have I learned about processing in 18 months?  Perhaps to be more careful about red/cyan fringing, a sometimes unavoidable issue of lenses and light. In any case, the processing I had done was not acceptable to me. As red/cyan fringing must be handled at the point of converting RAW files into a working format, the task of reprocessing sent me deep into my archives and faced me with a mystery. 

I can't recall ever trying to duplicate a particular finish before, but I took that as my goal. The processing had not been simple. My collection of tools & techniques has changed in the intervening time. I've managed to achieve the same tonalities and look of the earlier image, the fringing is gone, and the sky behind the trees is superior here.  I'm still not sure if the first final image had been warped into its finished design or if it was a melding of two different originals. Enough to say I am unable to recreate its exact contours, and in that respect this image is different.

I have just discovered other photos from the Peter's Valley shoots that I think worth processing, and the anniversary of that shoot seems an apt time, and an opportunity to revisit from farther off.

Returning from Wangum Pond, the Day before April, 2012 (revised)

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: On second thought, a tight crop on the left side brings focus to a composition that was in danger of becoming static. The areas on either side of the central tree weren't in play. The crop adds importance to the bright snow and sky on the right side and motion to the central tree.

Returning from Wangum Pond, the Day before April, 2012

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: On the way home we are stopped in our tracks by a hillside orchard under slaty sky. Here, the subject commands the stage and we dance to its tune. Three steps forward and the trees spread wide; five steps back and the trees collide. Step to the left, step to the right, do-si-do and, swing her round,then change lenses, and do it again.

  

Wangum Pond, the Day before April, 2012, No.5

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The skeletal forms of the bog attract me and the textures, but photography at its simplest is about filling a rectangle, and the fun here is in teasing a bit of order from the riot of the chaos where so many things vie to be the subject.

Wangum Pond, the Day before April, 2012, No.5

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Casual visitors find such places death-like. Those who dwell know they are places intense with life.

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.