Excavating the Space We've Left Behind.

2088, Swing.
With heavy clouds and muddy soil, I go home. When I pull into the driveway, off of Route 890, there are tires over gravel, there is me and there are the cars whispering as they drive by. Here is the house my mother grew up in, here is the house my aunt still lives in. Here lives parts of me as a child in another lifetime, here lives bits and pieces of my family's history.



Backyard.
I have wanted to photograph my aunt Cecelia's, my mom's second oldest sister, house for a long time, since I started making pictures.

See, my mom's mom died was my mom was 20 of a heart attack. The details are vague to me, something involving elevator doors opening and closing and one minute being alive and the next not. I have never met my grandmother but the weight of her life and her death have been increasingly apparent to me. My mother marks time with the death of hers; the months before that day in 1978 and the 2-5-10 years after that compose the time line of her life.



Dining Room, Bathroom.
In this house, she, her husband, and her 5 children lived and worked in a space no larger than 900 square feet. My grandfather a dairy farmer, she ran a country store and gas station out of the basement, which still exists in the heavy oak cabinets that now are home to photo albums, Christmas decorations, clothing.

The presence of my family's history is so pervasive in this house that, at times, when I was there on a Sunday in April, I had to close my eyes a few times in order to push it out. Between being offered food ("Are you sure you aren't hungry? We have soup! What about a sandwich? Are you thirsty? Have some iced tea.") and talking about life's details, I took in all of the things that changed since I was young and all of the things that have changed from when my mom was young. The ironing board still comes out of the wall. The bathroom still has that wallpaper in it. The carpet is new, the metal cabinets replaced with a blond wood.



Basement Details.
At six, eight, ten, I was terrified of her basement. It was dark, filled with boxes of stuff and felt seemingly unending. There were doors and hallways to places that I had never been in and the majority of it was lit by one single light bulb, turned on by the pulling of a string.

It hasn't really changed much, except it is notably less terrifying than I thought it to be. It packed full of stuff, more stuff then I remembered. Several lifetimes full of stuff stacked to the ceiling, piled on shelves and arranged haphazardly in those oak cabinets.



Laundry Room.
The weight of home, of history, of time passing, of silence. I think about the details of my family's life, especially it's women, that I am now just learning, have just learned in the past few months and I am overwhelmed with questions. Who I am, who they were, who they are are intrinsically linked together with laughter and bitterness, in the spaces we keep, in the food we eat, in the shape of our bodies.

Interior.

Control Panel, Hardhats. Meadowbrook Coal Company, Lykens Pa. 2006.

A Visual Assault of Sorts.

Family Fun Center.

Merchants' Square, Allentown PA.

It's a really beautiful moment when, amidst feelings of detachment, confusion and alienation, the world hands a picture to you with a smirk on it's face and whispers "Here. This one is for you."

More on Merchants' Square in the coming days. The world is warming, slowly, and this weekend I am headed back to the place that birthed me.

Food & Books.

Traveler's Restaurant, near the CT/MA border on I-84.
Holiday tradition, since 2006 has involved driving from Boston, MA to Allentown, PA. The six hour drive was punctuated by all of the familiar landmarks and stops. It got to the point that from any given place along the route that I traveled, I knew approximately how long it would be until I got home, within ten minutes or so.

This year, that holiday tradition was (thankfully) broken, as I've moved back to the place I really call home. It felt weird not to set off Wednesday morning from the outskirts of Boston, pointed southwest, my car's wheels coasting over the cold asphalt at 70mph. Thanksgiving this year was a mere hour drive, along curving back roads with high beams guiding my way.

I found this one on my harddrive, along with some other ignored goodies, and I really like it. The repeating pastoral scene on the wallpaper border is something full of brilliance, given the landscape is punctuated with John Deere tractors. I took it on a trip to Lebanon, CT with A. Kilton and her polaroid in tow, for Easter dinner at her aunt's house. That trip is yet another series of directions and sights and smells and experiences that composed a holiday tradition that became my own. It will be broken this year; after all, I moved home and back into traditions that were only ever partially mine to begin with.

Lost but Not Forgotten, from the Dark Heart of a Dream.

Front Room and Kitchen of 200 Broadway, Sunbury.
Estate sales are strange. The act of dragging out a deceased relatives belongings onto the lawn and letting perfect strangers bid on objects that someone lived their entire lives with and, in some ways, through is a weird thing to witness.



Backyard of 200 Broadway, Sunbury.
My aunt's (technically my mom's cousin but it's a minor detail of being from a small town) father passed away last month and they had a houseful of a two lives fully lived in one place to take care of. After taking what they (her herself and her sisters) wanted from the house, they called in an auction company to organize and clean out everything that was left.



Driveway of 200 Broadway, Sunbury.
I pointed myself and my car north and westward on Saturday morning and arrived in Sunbury at 11.15 or so. My main goal of the morning was to bid on a silver 50's dinette set in immaculate condition with all 6 chairs, which was successful. I spent the late morning and early afternoon chatting with people I haven't seen since I was 9 or so, eating hot dogs from a church vendor and listening to the chatter of the auctioneer.



Front Door of 200 Broadway, Sunbury PA.
I hadn't been in the house since I was probably 4 and I have only small, vague memories of it. While I've been in houses that are totally empty before, I was struck by how vacant the spaces felt. The carpet in the living room was faded around where furniture sat, the floor worn was down in the upstairs hallway. Closet doors hung open, pillows and clothes lay in corners. Dust shone in the sunlight and despite the backyard being full of people, the upstairs was silent.



Front Bedroom, Upstairs Hallway of 200 Broadway, Sunbury PA.

These photographs ended up being edited as darker than I expected, especially since they are digital. I always find myself making all of my photos darker than I shot them (even though I underexpose them by 1/2 a stop), especially interiors, because I like how aggressive the colors become. I especially enjoy it when the little bit of light in the interiors glows.

Blast Furnace B

I'm really, super excited about the experience of photographing Bethlehem Steel. It was fantastic and interesting and overwhelming. I want to talk about it more in detail but I wanted to post this because I think I'm in love with it. I have two others that I like and plan on sharing in the nearish future but I think this one is going in the steel frame for class.

I'd really really love to continue photographing there and examining the space as it changes and morphs into it's future. I think documenting that process is probably as important as photographing it as it was. To document as the site steps out of it's former self is really interesting. I am excited to do something with that idea, to make it into pictures.

Also, since I shot square for so long, my mind is blown at the way a panoramic can convey space, obviously. I feel like this format can (and probably will) be used to inform and expand Coal Hunkie even further, since I feel it was one of the things missing from the project. There's probably a thin line with the format between really interesting and hokey. I'd like to think I have a better eye than to make it hokey.

The Union Forever?

MassArt Metal Shop, March 5th.

I spent 2 hours last night at the forge. There is something ridiculously satisfying in heating up a piece of metal and banging the shit out of it to make an object. I spent an hour bent over a table with a TIG welding gun in one hand and filler wire in the other, running beads over 1/16" pieces of steel. I didn't really make anything interesting or nice to look at but I made metal stick together, I shaped steel into a spiral. Making photographic prints seemingly pales in comparison to bending steel, to moving a puddle of liquid metal along a seam to bond them. Perhaps because I haven't made prints of my own photographs for a long time or perhaps because welding is a shitload of fun.

Since I've found I am not absolutely terrible at arc welding, I've been kicking around the idea of actually going to welding school and/or becoming an apprentice. I like the idea of being a highly skilled trade worker, of being in a union, of working with metal. I want to be able to walk away from a day of work, having made something, having a physical object to show that I did something that day. I am less confident in my art schooling and my skills in networking as a means to get a job or make money; I suspect the only reason I went was to learn how to think. I love to make photographs, I love to think and talk but as someone who comes from a working class background, it feels absurd to think that I can do something so rife with privilege, that requires the type of money that I doubt that I will ever see.

That said, I've been considering this the way I consider most things: doing lots of research and thinking. Excited by possibility, I launched into a week-long research project about welding, what you can do with it, where you can go to learn and so on and so forth. There is an organization out of Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston, called Women in the Building Trades. WIBT is an organization that is "devoted to helping women pursue careers in the skilled trades". They have a introduction to the trades class for women and offer a pre-apprenticeship class that includes such things as math for construction, strength training and hands-on projects. In a similar vein, Tradeswomen Now and Tomorrow is a national coalition of tradeswomen's organizations and advocates and is a fabulous resource. There is also a welding school in the Lehigh Valley, PA, Welder Training and Testing Institute where one can obtain welding skills and certificates.

What I am caught up on, what I trip over is of having a non-traditional career for a female. It's daunting to think about being in a primarily male-dominated job place and all of the shit that comes along with that. I like the idea of not having to put on female-ness in the morning in the form of clothes and make up, of getting to wear boots and a hard hat. It is one part empowering and one part nerve wracking.

Formal Living Room, Atlas PA.

Good god, I love this photo.